Vestits de Ceba

Toni Vidal (Menorca, 1934) is a photographer with a longstanding career, an artist of photography who has developed a body of work of great expressive beauty resolved with a great command of the technique. Since he began, sixty years ago, he was a portraitist, portraits produced with delicacy and far removed from the album snap, portraits that capture the underlying argument beyond that of the image. First it was people, and soon also rocks, rural architecture and plant-life. The result of this later work is the book Vestits de ceba, where Toni Vidal presents the results of twenty years’ work consisting of turning mundane matter into poetic matter, in this case the onion and the most external of the leaves that protect the bulb, those that botanists call tunics, and that is where the title comes from, dressed. This visual and expressive metamorphosis that the photographer offers us is strengthened with the collaboration of more than twenty poets who have provided Toni Vidal with their poetic creations expressly for his “Vestits”, such as Montserrat Abelló, Narcís Comadira, José Corredor-Matheos, Miquel Desclot or the late Joan Brossa, Maria Mercè Marçal, Joan Perucho, Jordi Sarsanedas, Josep Palau i Fabre and Yael Languella. This book also serves as homage.