Beautiful: Carmelo Blazquez Jimenez: Sculptor of Light

ALWAYS HAVING BEEN INSPIRED BY THE WORLD OF ART ESPECIALLY SCULPTURES, CARMELO BLAZQUEZ KNEW HE HAD TO FIND AN OUTLET FOR HIS CREATIVITY WHICH WASN’T SCULPTING. SIMPLY BECAUSE HE JUST DIDN’T HAVE THE RIGHT SKILL SET FOR THAT EXPRESSION OF ART. AND SO HE TURNED TO WHAT HE KNEW HE COULD DO: PHOTOGRAPHY. AND BY DOING SO, CARMELO BECAME A SCULPTOR OF LIGHT.

For as long as he can remember there has always been a camera in Carmelo Blazquez’ home. His family embraced the art of photography and Carmelo remembers spending hours lying in bed with his mother and sister, looking through old family photos his mother kept in an old cookie box. Still it was only 5 years ago that Carmelo started his photography studies at the School of Design and Image IDEP in Barcelona. “I was fascinated to understand controlling light in photography,” he explains. “It is like learning to do magic. I took up the desire to be a sculptor, but different from a sculptor of stone, a sculptor of light: the darkness in my photographs is my marble and light is like my chisel.”

Carmelo Blazquez Jimenez was born 35 years ago in Córdoba, Andalucía, in southern Spain but lives since 12 years in Barcelona. Besides photography he also studied Ancient World History and Art History. “I have always been attracted to the ancient world, its art, its characters, and the conception of man and his world, a world that was eclipsed during the Middle Ages until the Renaissance.” Inspired by the old masters of painting and sculpture of the Italian Renaissance it seems inevitable that part of Carmelo’s influences finds its origin in religion. For him the true sense of beauty has always been related to the world of emotion and mysticism. “Since I was little, I have been attracted by the beauty and the perfection of the male body. In beauty there is the mixture of admiration and the forbidden, of sin and desire. The first time in my life where I saw a nearly naked man, with perfect musculature, was in church: the icon of Christianity.”

Carmelo Blazquez is passionate about artistic nude photography. For him nudity is the state in which the human being is most fragile and vulnerable, but also closer to his animal nature. But he also recognizes the challenge in his line of work: “Working my model nude, even though we have never met before, even though we have only spoken by email or over the phone requires effort and managing expectations before and during the shoot. For this reason, I like working with models that make my job easier – they have seen my work and want to work with me and they trust me. I put no limits on creation.” Though there is definitely a certain eroticism in his work, Carmelo does not define his photography as gay art. He describes his work as universal with no intended sexual orientation. “We respond to a work personally, individually, based on our ideology, our culture, our desires, or mood, our own personal erotic. It is necessarily subjective. Michelangelo’s David, the Sistine Chapel full of male nudes: is it gay art?”

Fascinated by forms, color and content, Carmelo Blazquez Jimenez strives to portray man as he was intend to: a masterpiece of nature. He strongly believes that everyone is beautiful in its natural perfection regardless of the stage of life. Following Leonardo DaVinci’s motto that beauty dies in life but is immortal in art, Carmelo has made it is personal objective to immortalize his subjects as the godlike beings they are. No lesser than what the Ancient Greek sculptors such as Phidias, Scopas A,ND Praxiteles did when they carved their blocks of marble. –BM-

Visit Fine Art for Men for a full interview with Carmelo Blazquez Jimenez.