If David Lachapelle’s best known work is a kind of beyond real reimagining of the here and now, Eugenio Recuenco’s is its parallel world brethren from a never-never land that belongs to a previous time that you can’t quite define…

I could well draw a line of connections between David Lachapelle’s, Eugenio Recuenco’s and Erwin Olaf’s work – they share some aesthetic and positional similarities; all exist in an imaginary world and land that mixes/draws from commercial fashion photography, high-end almost Hollywood-esque production values, fine art photography that moves away from the more gritty, social realist, documentary side of such things.

It’s this sequence in particular that I love of Eugenio Recuenco’s work; set in some imaginary hotel from a not quite definable past (1920s-1930s-meets a touch of 1970s glamour-esque?) and creates a world where Vanessa Paradis’ other world sister has booked a room in this plush, velvet, Disney-gone-rather-dark fantasy; all clockwork villains, wax like staff, keyhole peepers and bath time on the roof accompanied by your very own jazz trio…

…dreamlike, seductive and somewhere that makes me both want to visit and escape – as may well do all good fairy tales.

(Looking at the work again I can see a touch of the previous era decadence, style and glamour of Biba, maybe a smidgeon of Blue Velvet/last episode of Twin Peaks era David Lynch and talking of fairy tales, Alice’s adventures down the well and through the looking-glass.)

If you have the pennies, there is a rather fine and grand 300 page collection of his work called Revue. Visit that at its publisher teNeues Verlag here and peruse it here.

Visit Eugenio Recuenco’s site here and photographs from this particular sequence here.