For several years now, Cano Erhardt, a Bilbao native who has made Madrid his home, and I have been talking about creating a photobook together. We have already done some work toward that end in his spacious, light-filled studio on Manuel Becerra in Madrid. The catalog for which I am writing these lines is not yet that book. But I want these lines to express the admiration I have felt for his monumental photographs ever since I discovered them thanks to Luis Burgos, his Madrid gallery owner.

As a friend of travel, I like the literature surrounding it, the anecdotes, the digressions, the sounds of the street, local foods, the memories of other travelers who have gone before me, consulting their books or guides, whether they be “authored” ones such as Levante by Elías Tormo, Baroja's Basque Country, or Otero Pedrayo's Galicia, or anonymous ones such as Baedeker or Michelin green or blue. In Cano Erhardt's photographs there is none of that, but rather high solitudes (the title, with Albertian resonances, of one of his cycles, exhibited in Bilbao in 2016 by Juan Manuel Lumbreras, and which inspired some beautiful verses by the late Marta Agudo), ultimate spaces, non-places. Bridges, viaducts, highways, secondary roads. Water. Snow. Ice. New World salt flats. Skies with light clouds at dusk. He himself sometimes contemplates his images, usually large format, as a theatrical stage. There is no guide for this journey.

Today I want to focus on these extreme images, from North Africa, Morocco, the Sahara, which are now on display at Luis Burgos' stand at the Estampa fair in Madrid. To stick to them. It is not the urban Morocco I know. As for the Sahara, Mauritania, and Senegal, all territories that take us to The Little Prince and its creator, I have only seen them from the air, and only once, during the most magical intercontinental flight I can remember.

There are no travel concessions in this photographer, no exotic fascination. The gallery of images unfolds, the asphalt ribbon of the road to the South of the South advances, there are a few traffic signs and some concrete markers and a few power line poles, inexorably there is a journey from you don't know where to we don't know where, with no population in sight (just a few earthen huts on the edge of a ravine, at the bottom of one of the images), with almost no other trace of human presence than those shacks, beyond those left by those who built the road or paved it or planted the signs or built the concrete markers or erected the power line poles.

The enormous beauty of these landscapes, of the desert lands, of the monstrous folds of the rocks, of the almost Zen-like curls (Ryoan-Ji, etc.) of the dunes, of the asphalt and the white lines that mark it, goes beyond the human. Lunar beauty, one might say at times, despite the sun that can be sensed. Textures. Color: ochres, yellows, blacks, grays, browns, and, on rare occasions, a timid green. All with absolutely relentless accuracy and precision, and the word precision reminds me that a century ago, in the United States, there was a very interesting movement in both painting and photography called precisionism.

However, there is absolutely nothing precisionist here. And even less pictorialist. Ultimately, I would say that Cano Erhardt's beautiful images, these current ones and others from equally portentous previous cycles, are the closest thing I know in photography to a certain painting of the sublime. Large-format photographs, in the style of the Düsseldorf School, that invite you to indulge in their leisurely contemplation, to lose yourself without thinking about anything, without needing specific references, without trying to unravel the mystery of their genesis. I don't think I'm far off the mark if I mention, in relation to this series, the first name that came to mind after seeing the photographs that comprise it: Mark Rothko, the unsurpassed Rothko, the painter of the sublime par excellence, the extreme Rothko, not in his moments of retinal joy when he worshipped Bonnard or Matisse, but in his final moments, so reminiscent of Goya's Dog.

 We remain in those lands of high solitude, of deserts, of silence, which the photographer has always loved.

But enough words, because in the end I wanted to avoid any distraction, but I have not mentioned one painter, but four, and six writers, Marta Agudo, Rafael Alberti, Saint-Exupéry (without naming him), and the three from the guides, which are of no use here, neither those nor any others.

After passing through the claustrophobic tunnel with traffic lights chosen for the cover, which, incidentally, is the only non-African image in the collection, come in and see for yourselves, and tell me if we are not in the presence of a photographer of the sublime, a traveler with an infallible instinct for detecting beauty (“I seek beauty, which I consider desirable in itself,” he wrote in 2018), whether near or, as in this case, far away, and displaying it before our astonished and grateful gaze.

JUAN MANUEL BONET
Madrid, September 2025