Nocturna

For seven years I photographed at night in more than fty museums around the world, wanting to know what happens to works of art when they are in private, what secrets these spaces hide when they are closed to the public, and what sensations can be experienced when walking through museum galleries at night. While fullling the fantasy of wandering through a closed museum, surrounded by works of art when no one is looking.

Nocturnal Museum Guide proposes a new interpretation of the works of art in museums, based on a different light, or the absence of it. In the museum, works of art participate in the viewer’s state of mind, and thanks to the aesthetic pleasure, the emotions they arouse and the knowledge they bring us, it is here that they nd all their meaning and importance. It is only in the museum and in the individual experience of the viewer that works of art become important realities for the present, fundamental experiences and insights. If you have the opportunity to contemplate the works of art during the hours when the museum is closed, in the silence of the night, all the feelings and emotions that they transmit to us are perceived in a more evident and direct way.

“As in a Rothko painting or in an Egyptian chamber, in these photographs each space is a
threshold, a place of passage to something beyond, darker”
Antonio Muñoz Molina, prologue to the book Nocturna 2017