The great transformations and radical changes that have occurred in these cities are not only of interest for urban and architectural studies but also for other disciplines. Photography is one of the said disciplines that has most carefully focused on such phenomenon. That curious attention has consolidated the development of a new language of a real tendency which could be called ´the urban photographic landscape´.

Hans Stoll is no stranger to this ambit as a large part of his work centres on the city and its architectural networks. With a free yet critical observation, his work aspires to provide an encompassing reflection on what is taking place in large urban centres.

Hypertelic urban constitutes a journey that the photographer undertakes around various cities where his camera discovers an abundance of images where the proportions have been betrayed. The exhibition is replete and mimetic as if it belonged to a large archipelago of concrete. The cities are hurried and resemble one another. However, it is manifest that they are not all the same; there are social, historical, geographical and climatic differences.

In his obsessive quest to find a new angle to capture the essence of a city, Stoll abandons the strictness of the fixed camera in order to migrate towards a frenzied language, a narrative capable of representing a large city, limitless in its expansion. As the true frame is presented as being incapable of photographing the expanding metropolis, Stoll decomposes and superimposes hundreds of images thereby reconfiguring an extended landscape that escapes from any apparatus typology.

In such a way the artist is inspired in the concept of “hypertely”, a neology formulated by the Cuba poet Jose Lezama Lima in order to refer to unbridled growth, to amorphic alteration and to all organisms that exceed their own limits, to the movement of going further than its objective, to the project that surpasses its own purpose; thereby converting into a push, an inertia, into a pig-headedness.

Consequently the hypertelic city is no longer just a city; it is now a dilated and deformed mass. It is a disfigured space for a conventional photographic narrative and susceptible to being visualised from a diffuse and abstract dimension. The city is thus presented as a metaphor of society, a cutting look at the contemporary world.

Exhibition held at Peruvian-British Arts Centre (Lima).