Nelson, Margaret and Elmer Modlin.
Rifling through a pile of domestic refuse one night in 2003, photographer Paco Gomez found what would become a fascinating project on the ideas of artistic construction and self-invention. At the time, Gomez, who was awarded PhotoEspaña's 'Revelation' prize in 2002 and is a member of the Nophoto photographers' collective, was probably not aware that behind the mountain of rubbish filling a corner of Madrid's Calle del Pez - countless old clothing, books and magazines in English, expired packaged food, paint-stained sheets and peculiar black and white photographs depicting three people posing nude in stilted set ups - there were multiple trails of whispers to be followed. Gomez took home the portraits, some letters and curiously the printed instructions for an electric juicer, and that's all his artistic investigation required to flesh out one of the most fascinating cases of art and life in the subculture of a city in a time of political and cultural transition.
The protagonists of this story are the American ex-pat Modlin Family and their eccentric quest for artistic fulfilment. Elmer, a Hollywood actor, and Margaret, a would-be Surrealist painter, decided to settle in Madrid in the 1970s, having sent their only son, sixteen-year-old Nelson, ahead of them, on a school programme. Nelson soon settled in, learning Spanish, getting work as a model and securing a place for his parents to join him in their Spanish adventure. Elmer and Margaret lived in Madrid for thirty years but never learned a word of the language. Placing their aspirations on Nelson and making him their only conduit to the real world, the marriage shut the door on time.
Theirs was a fantasy world of artistic isolation, of heady ideas and ambitious idealism, a world which dissolved into a mere stack of papers and dusty stretchers when the light of day was allowed in their shuttered artificial light garret studio, witnessed by Gomez after securing entrance permission and filled in by the few of the family's acquaintances he's been able to track. It was in this light and seclusion that Margaret painted her icy figurations, described by family friend Henry Miller as reminiscent of de Chirico and Max Ernst's style in a catalogue essay, self-assured but never entirely given that much attention by her contempories. It's difficult to consider these paintings, now at last on view again at Madrid's AVA gallery, far apart from the documents salvaged from her house by Gomez, also on view at the gallery - in their repetitive artificiality and solipsistic, self-aggrandising imagery, they are pictures of a family abounding with artistic creativity but perhaps drowned in the ultimate isolation of self-obsession. A documentary on the Modlins is currently being finished and will be out later this year.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
Article on El Pais on the Modlin family project (in Spanish).
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