Artist: Roberto Huarcaya
Dates: June 5th 2025 to July 18th 2025

In this exhibition, Peruvian artist Roberto Huarcaya presents a selection of his emblematic photograms produced between 2014 and 2024, showcasing a powerful visual and conceptual exploration of the relationship between body, landscape, and memory. Seeing by Contact offers an immersive experience in which the photographic image, stripped of the camera and constructed through light and direct contact with matter, becomes a tool for expanded perception.

Huarcaya appropriates the photogram — a primal photographic technique that predates even the invention of the camera — to produce works on a monumental scale. These images, created using processes such as cyanotype or Van Dyke brown printing, are the result of extensive expeditions across various Peruvian territories. There, the artist unfurls large rolls of photosensitive paper to capture the physical traces of natural and cultural elements: leaves, branches, roots, stones, ritual objects, masks, costumes, musical instruments, or even the very bodies of the subjects portrayed.

This artisanal process, which challenges the immediacy of contemporary digital imagery, articulates an alternative vision of photography. The aim is not to capture a fleeting instant, but to allow time, matter, and light to interact with the surface for hours, sometimes days, in a gesture that links the photographic with the sculptural, the performative, and the ritual.

In this sense, the works of Seeing by Contact go beyond the purely visual plane to activate a haptic, almost tactile perception. The viewer is confronted with bodies and landscapes that have not merely been photographed, but literally touched by the image itself. This strategy disrupts conventional logics of framing, composition, and perspective, shifting the gaze towards a more sensitive, bodily, and immersive form of knowledge.

The exhibition also marks a significant moment in Huarcaya’s career, as he represents Peru at the 60th Venice Biennale with his project Cosmic Traces, an immersive installation in which photographic image, sound, and sculpture converge into an expanded experience. Seeing by Contact shares this same impulse: to overflow the boundaries of the medium, to question regimes of visibility, and to open the act of seeing to new forms of engagement with the world.

Presented for the first time in Europe as part of PHotoESPAÑA 2025, the exhibition at Ponce+Robles gallery invites the public to immerse themselves in a radical visual poetics, where looking also means allowing oneself to be penetrated, touched, and transformed.

Roberto Huarcaya (Lima, 1959) is a renowned Peruvian photographer whose work is characterised by the exploration of experimental photographic techniques and the representation of the relationship between human beings and nature. Initially trained in Psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, he later studied Film at the Italian Cultural Institute and Photography at the Centro del Video y la Imagen in Madrid, where he began his career in photography in 1989.

Over more than three decades, Huarcaya has developed an artistic practice centred on the use of large-format, camera-less photograms that capture the essence of diverse Peruvian landscapes through the direct contact of natural elements with photosensitive paper. This approach has enabled him to create emblematic series such as Amazogramas, Andegramas and Océanos, which have been exhibited at major institutions and international festivals including the Venice Biennale, PHotoESPAÑA, Paris Photo, and Les Rencontres d’Arles.

In addition to his artistic work, Huarcaya has made significant contributions to the education and dissemination of photography in Peru. He was the founder and director of the Centro de la Imagen in Lima from 1999 to 2022, and has taught at various academic institutions. His work forms part of permanent collections at renowned museums and contemporary art centres such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Fine Arts Museum of Houston, and the Museo de Arte de Lima.