JAMES H. SOUL film photography & analogue art

James H. Soul (1970) doesn’t like talking about his life; it makes him feel uncomfortable and he eludes questions on the subject by cracking the odd joke or making some remark that is probably true. Born to a Dutch mother and an unknown father, James travelled a lot during his childhood together with his siblings and parents. Rumour has it or at least I’ve been lead to believe that his father was the drummer of a famous band back in the 1970s. His younger sister lives in Porto Seguro, Brasil; he doesn’t deny it and adds with a resentful gaze that they were abandoned by their parents in Pretoria, South Africa, while his father’s band was on tour in that country. James, Carmen and Haché, his younger brother, found themselves alone in a luxury hotel, with their parents missing after a night of heavy drinking and taking drugs. After spending a week living in the hotel, their Aunt took them into her house in Amsterdam where they spent most of their teenage years. That was where James started experimenting and developing his artistic skills, mixing photography and painting from the very beginning. However, a fire that broke out in his Aunt’s flat destroyed most of his initial works. Only a few of them, which he keeps in a safe place, were left. After that incident the three siblings scattered around the world and little is known about their lives until in 2010 I met James at a friend’s restaurant in Ibiza. He was working as a waiter, didn’t look at all like an artist and was very open and outgoing. I liked him from the start. After a night of partying, part of the group of friends who had got together, including myself, went over to his small apartment where I saw some of the works he did now and then. I was most impressed by them as they didn’t resemble anything I had seen until then, with the possible exception of Peter Beard’s works – though without the exoticism of Africa – or perhaps those of Robert Rauschenberg with his typical collages and mixtures of techniques. I proposed to James to leave Ibiza and come over to Barcelona where I would help him to develop all that talent which I could see he possessed but couldn’t exploit for a number of reasons. He arrived in Barcelona shortly after and we got down to work on his first photo session; a whole display of manual processing like I hadn’t seen for quite some time, a camera with film plates, hours spent in the photography lab: "I had forgotten how the liquids smell" – he told me -,  artistic papers, paint brushes, water colours, pens, ink… a complex process of work that was totally hand-made. A unique artist in the middle of the digital age; that is what James is.

                                                                                                                                                                            Humberto Vignali

                                                                                                                                                                      Representative and friend