If landscape is the product of visual perception, Juan Travnik (Buenos Aires, 1950) has built, over time, a personal topography that is the fruit of his contemplation. His landscapes reveal an appreciation of the world as well as his conception of photography.
As every great work of art, Travnik´s images are characterized by the consistency of their internal laws. His photographs, which conform to this rule, form part of a continuum that had black-and-white medium-size prints as its point of departure and arrived naturally at the current panoramic C-prints. Photographs of the neighborhood, the city center, the beach or the countryside. Or the other way round, as if one walked backwards: the countryside, the beach, the city center and the neighborhood. All of them translated into the language of the author, who builds a language within a language, a territory within the territory. These are circumscribed, marked spaces that refer not so much to a series of more or less objective values regarding the world, but rather to a series of personal convictions. Along this road, form is investigated, polished, and inscribed in the sensitive surface of silver. This search does not imply abstraction or an absence of content; it rather implies explorations of aesthetic procedures charged with sufficient experience and ambiguity to produce in the viewer a desolate feeling of dismay. The eye must get used to what did not exist; hence the almost ritual disorientation that these images produce in terms of artworks.
Faithful to a personal vision, Travnik´s photographs are identifiable due to the concision of their details, their textures, the ephemeral light nuances; the repertory of arranged elements that put our haptic aptitudes to the test. And although the prestige of photographs is not based on appearances, what is ultimately decisive is the photographer’s relationship with the technique he uses to consummate the photographic act. Travnik is impelled by the wish to attain an increasing knowledge of the tools of his trade, in order to be able to use them more efficiently in favor of a more transcendent program of which his whole oeuvre represents a series of variations: historical pain, identities, the poetic disenchantment derived from a changing world, and the distressed beauty of abandoned objects as conditions of the world we inhabit.
By contrast with the phenomena of a snapshot, using a plate camera and resorting to delayed exposure at the time of each shot, he captures in his photographs an original time, a time of introspection that makes way for a suggestive intimacy.
Unfurnished cities, transfigured street corners, shop-windows, façades, and fields, propitiate the illusion of an aura without any artifice. A strange and healthy situation for photography, which reserves as a last refuge for the human face this unrepeatable appearance of remoteness, this most particular weft of time and space. In a Benjaminian sense, it is understood.
From the open planes to the specific details, Travnik has succeeded in delimiting his aesthetic program, his ever-expanding territory.
The poetics of the action is the shadow that constitutes its imprint, from where it unravels the essence of things. Hence its laws, its own laws, independent of vogues. This rigorous program is achieved by a handful of artists, and it demands strictness, hard work, intelligence and talent.
As a delimited territory, as a state within a state, Travnik´s region is of the same order as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha in the field of literature, and of the other paradoxical ones (from north to south): Comala, Santa Maria and Gral. Belgrano, on the shores of the Salado River.
Inhabited and inhabitable territories, real in and by themselves, outlining their relief in the light of a series of original values. Territories that ultimately determine a certain particular relationship with the visible.

Julio Fuks, September 2006