MEXICO CITY.- The representation of the landscape is generally associated to the traveler’s gaze who discovers constructions and images scientific or romantic during his journey. However, a difference exists between the walker who observes and what Dennis Crosgove describes as an insider: the one who inhabits the landscape. For this one, he says, “there is no clear separation between scene, subject and object”, because his relationship with the landscape has to do with a social and familiar place.

In this sense, Juan Carlos Coppel is an insider of his own territory. His job as a farmer forces him to be continuously immersed in the management of a productive space, which at the same time returns sensible images about the power of the industry and the exploitation of the earth from a close and emotional perspective.

Although his images and sculptures could be linked to the tradition of geographical landscape photography, or the cabinets of naturalist explorers of the seventeenth century, they are actually records of observations and daily work on the transformation of the land. Therefore, his gaze is not only aimed to discover the sublime in the monumentality of the landscape, but to warn a critical stance on industrial agronomists processes, which at the same time reveal textures, reticles and tissues that alter our perception of the natural environment.

Similarly, the waste collected by the artist during his journeys across the crops (animals, mud, plastic, wooden boxes) are reconfigured in almost archeological sculptures and installations where the landscape is tamed again. In the exhibition Peregrino /per-agrare/ which means man walking the field, the artist distorts the landscape from abstraction -analogous to a Smithsonian “no place”- while evidencing notions about the process and time of work. Finally, Coppel is as incisive as poetic, as he makes the reflection between exploitation and perception of the landscape, and brings us to a critical perspective about power, nature and the passage of time.

Juan Carlos Coppel was born in Tucson, Arizona in 1986. Nowadays he lives and woks at Hermosillo, Mexico.

In 2014 he was selected for the Contemporary Photography Program in North Mexico where he developed his most famous project Siete Cerros, in which he approach the agriculture subject in Sonora, Mexico as an aesthetic matter. The serie project was exhibited in a collective exposition at the Art Museum in Sonora in 2014, that same year he won the Adquisición de Fotoseptiembre Sonora award.

In 2015 Juan Carlos Coppel was invited to join several collective exhibitions such as Tiempo, Coletiva No.2 in Mexico City, Existe lo que tiene nombre in San Francisco, Develar y detonar in Madrid, Guatefoto en Guatemala and Looking In. Looking Out, Latin America Photography in Santa Barbara. At the end of the year he was invited to the 4th edition of Salón Acme in Mexico City, and won the Acquisition Prize in the XV Bienal de Artes Visuales del Noroeste with the piece, Babel 5263. In 2016 he will participate in an itinerant group show in different museums and galleries across the country. This year the series La Quema was selected for the XVII Biennial of Photography in Centro de La Imagen, Mexico City, and also for the VII Biennial of Visual Arts MIRADAS in Tijuana, Mexico.

Coppel studied Industrial System Engineer at the ITESM and took specialized courses in photography with Jay Dickman (Pulitzer Award winner) at the National Geographic, in Paris with Manuel Abellán and at the International Center of Photography in New York.

He is member of the Northwest Art Program and is part of the private collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the collection of Fundación Televisa, among others.