TOM WATSON & OLENA MYLENKO: The Eye of Fashion

Fashion and photography crossed paths forever in the preamble to contemporaneity, representing another aesthetic level within art, a discipline that swings between two new desires: the personal image and its public projection. This is why the contemporary phenomenon of fashion is born with photography and its capacity for seduction, communication, contextualisation and recurrent updating of dreams, ambitions and emotions. A phenomenon that functions as the great visual archive of our socio-cultural metamorphosis.

In this context, Tom Watson's work represents a unique value, a driving force behind a lively, chromatic and stimulating iconography. The beauty of his photography lies in an inexhaustible narrative expressiveness, made up of multiple stories, in the transcription of momentum as a force that activates the imagination and directly connects the eye with the story, fantasising with the complicity of the spectator. Each story told aspires to sublimate the singular transience of a moment. The success and transcendence of his work has materialised in collaborations with historic publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair, as well as international brands such as Cerruti, Trussardi and Desigual, among others. Beyond occupying a place among the great names in fashion photography, Watson is the creator of a unique style that encompasses all categories, establishing himself as a master of this total art.

Along with photography, illustration is the other source that provides visual narratives in this context of beauty and spectacularity. Illustration and design are indissoluble in nature, a stimulating union that emerges directly from the sphere of ideas. The artist Olena Mylenko thus completes the dialogue between two primordial ways of conceiving and telling fashion on paper, transmitting not only creative proposals but a whole imaginary. Through the scenes of fashion shows, poses and profiles, her watercolour drawings capture the drama of the movements, the richness of the textiles, shapes and details, while aesthetically connecting with the tradition of the figurines, resources of enormous symbolism, icons for the recreation of a dream.

Both artists constitute the creative breath, a nexus between fantasy and society and above all, as in the present exhibition, they are the eye that projects the visual heritage of fashion.

Reyes Abad Flores