Xavi Bou

“Nature is the original generative artist. Just look at a tree’s root structure, the shape a river takes as it cuts through the land, the rippling patterns of rain drops in puddles. If you tune in, generative art is all around us. Xavi Bou is tuned in. He sees art in the flight paths of birds, and though his work is photographic, it captures the generative aspect of nature as well as any. Whether smooth and controlled or varied and chaotic, Bou’s vision forms a nexus of art, nature, science, and technology to propose new ways of seeing. In turn, he unlocks for us a form of sight unnatural to the naked eye, yet revealing of the underlying harmonies that form the natural world.” — Curator Ned Ryerson.

The photographer’s admiration for nature, especially for birds, arose during his childhood thanks to unforgettable long walks with his grandfather. Since then, the photographer’s interest in birds has continued to grow, eventually becoming the focus of his project “Ornitographies”

Ornitographies arises from the author’s concern for capturing those unnoticed moments and from the interest in questioning the limits of human perception. Xavi Bou focuses on birds, his great passion, in order to capture in a single time frame, the shapes they generate when flying, making visible the invisible.

Unlike other motion analysis which preceded it, “Ornitographies” moves away from the scientific approach of chronophotography used by photographers like Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. Technology, science and creativity combine to create evocative images which show the sensuality and beauty of the bird’s movements and which are, at the same time, clues for those wishing to identify or recognize them.

In “Ornitographies”, the skill envied by men, the long lasting shared yearning of flying, is presented to us, extending our visual perception. Art and science walk hand in hand to create images, which are no longer a single portrait of reality but become a witness of the instants that, for a moment, were past, present and future all at once.

“Ornitographies” is a balance between art and science; a nature-based dissemination project and a visual poetry exercise but above all, an invitation to perceive the world with the same curious and innocent look of the child we once were.