Jose Manuel Ballester is a Spanish artist who recreates the most famous classical paintings in the world but leaves out the central aspect: the man.
Imagine Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus without the splendid goddess in the painting, or Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper without Jesus and his apostles, almost impossible, comes to mind.
On the canvas, or rather on the frame, all that remains is the nature that surrounded him, the architecture that welcomed him.
The Spanish photographer believes that the duty of art is to shake minds, showing the dark beauty of the world.

The room of Las Meninas by Velàsquez remains vacant: the royal family posed and the court painter disappeared, a real surreal landscape, without flowers or mythological creatures, then Picasso’s Guernica, reduced to a collage of a few surviving forms. Once again Velàsquez with Christ Crucified without Christ, The Raft of the Medusa of Géricault, which saw its shipwrecked people drowned, or Goya’s disturbing shooting of 3 May 1808, of which a lantern remains on the ground, between a bloodstain and the echo of gunfire.

Jose Manuel Ballester is an artist who appreciates the value of solitude, enhances it in some way and celebrates it by eliminating everything that seems superfluous to his eyes.
All you have to do is look from a different perspective at the great masterpieces of art history without human figures, but which reveal so many of those spaces hitherto hidden and unnoticed.