Silence Project

Her first photographs from the late seventies and beginning of the eighties address the private space from the aesthetics of the family photo album. In the last decade, Mayoral has been delving into the most current contemporary portraiture photography, making this genre the fundamental poetic support of her photographic project. She investigates the mechanisms of the expressionist language of the portrait in works like those of Thomas Struff, taking it to its ultimate expressive aesthetic consequences. Her portraits using the face as the foreground, “document”, from a forensic visual perspective, the most absolute expressiveness of the face in its most utter reality, enriching our psychological perception of the portrait. Her photographic project, Before (Now) After, can be viewed as her most personal work, one with a distinctive mastery of the symbolic assets of contemporary photography. It also constitutes a bold and innovative conceptual proposal on the updating on the genre of the portrait in postmodernity.

These are scenes that capture the intimacy and the habits of domestic life, narrated with images encrypted in autobiography. In the nineties, she develops a special interest in natural themes and landscape photos in general. This interest coincides with a greater control, on the part of the author, of the techniques and tools of scientific digital photography applied to plant photography and other natural or artificial elements. These images, which contain natural elements in the foreground, are influenced by the work of modern-day authors such as Imogen Cunninghan. This is when she begins her exploration of the expressive possibilities of the portrait. Towards the end of the nineties and the beginning of 2000, the theme of the city, its architecture and its urbanology as a stage for the contradictory relationship between individuality and overcrowding, begins to take a leading role in her work, where the influence of Jeff Wall can be appreciated. These are works that “look”, in a sort of voyeuristic style, at the gestures and attitudes either of individuals or of a group; they speak to us of life in the cities of our time.