The ‘Hopper Essence’ series by photographer Andrés Gallego are photographs based on the work of Edward Hopper (USA, 1882-1967), in which the views from the windows have been transferred by the artist himself with acrylic paint on canvas, as well as the scenography, reproduced on a true scale. On them his wife is depicted, exactly as Hopper depicted his Jo. It can be seen as a portrait of her or, as the painter did, as a portrait of each one of us, a place to hide.
It is curious to think that, for a time, Edward Hopper photographed architectural details and spaces and then used the images to support the development of his work, and that he abandoned this procedure, convinced that the photographs differed greatly from the perspective of the human eye. Perhaps he thought that it is impossible to represent what we see with our eyes through a lens, or that what is important, after all, is his own internal vision, i.e., subjective perception.
In 1992, a number of American photographers paid homage to Hopper in an exhibition linking photography and painting. At the event, Joel Meyerowitz emphasised the fundamental difference between the nature of photography as a momentary event and the nature of painting as a process, but what happens when we unite both languages in the same work?