Perfect Day
Txema Salvans

$45.00

"An illuminating look that delves into the human being and his relationship with that degraded space in which he lives, where reality is more certain, also more threatening, accentuating his most absurd side.” / ["Una mirada esclarecedora que profundiza en el ser humano y en su relación con ese espacio degradado en el que habita, donde la realidad se muestra más cierta, también más amenazadora, acentuando su lado más disparatado."] - El País 

"'Perfect Day', the fifth book of the Spanish artist, shows an isolated humanity and social distance even before the outbreak of the coronavirus." / ["'Perfect Day', il quinto libro dell'artista spagnolo, mostra un’umanità isolata e a debita distanza sociale già prima dello scoppio del coronavirus.”] - Rolling Stone Italia

In Perfect Day, Txema Salvans photographs Spain's holiday-makers in unexpected corners of the postindustrial landscape. Sunbathers congregate in car parks, swimming pools are nestled between encroaching buildings, and cranes and cooling towers loom over beaches. In these surreal, banal and humorous scenes, Salvans reveals how the pursuit of leisure persists in spite of the ominous pressures of the built environment, expressing a deeply human determination to adapt, and find repose, against the odds.

Although many of these photographs were made near the sea, the sea itself remains invisible: a silent, implicit witness and a backcloth that has been inverted. Instead, we see – in a literal sense – what the images’ subjects want to turn their back on. Beneath the surface of these scrupulously composed tableaux are potent questions about class, national identity, and the politics of space: a depiction of simple pleasures advocating our rights to them.


Embossed hardback
28 x 27.5 cm

ISBN 978-1-912339-68-6
May 2020
$45