Patricia Ruiz del Portal is a young photographer living in Barcelona. If there were a soundtrack to her photographs, it would include Nick Cave’s song “From her to eternity,” in which a piano is played in an irregular rhythm and Cave sings the lyrics: “Walkin' barefoot cross the floor-boards/All thru this lonesome night/And ah hear her crying too./Hot-tears come splashin' on down/Leaking thru the cracks,/ Down upon my face, ah catch'em in my mouth!/Walk'n'cry Walk'n'cry-y!!!/From her to eternity!/ From her to eternity!/From her to eternity! Ah read her diary on her sheets/Scrutinizin' every lil bit of dirt/Tore out a page'n'stufft it inside my shirt/Fled outa the window,/And shinning it down the vine/Outa her night-mare, and back into mine/ Mine! O Mine!”

Patricia Ruiz del Portal’s photographs mirror the erotic atmosphere of this song. Strange, beautiful girls gather in unknown and bleak places. A destroyed piano in an artist studio is a contrast to the sensuality of a devastated girl in a state of ecstasy on someone’s bed. Models that look straight out of a Guy Bourdin magazine cover are placed in a nasty kitchen with a loaf of baked bread. Waking up after having wet dreams in front of a wild jungle on a Berlin window. Barefoot walking around a pole bar while Nick Cave is singing.

Patricia started taking pictures over a year ago, and she is currently working as fashion stylist. Her photography career started after she quit her job as a lawyer. Her curiosity led her to grab a camera and start shooting. She is curious about things, locations, emotions, and people; her friends and different people, who she randomly meets, are some of her inspirations and subjects.

Her attention to detail defines a hard and magnetic aesthetic. She likes the beauty of details. However, her sense of beauty is understood in modern terms, such as Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal: “Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, /Beauty? Your gaze, divine and infernal, /Pours out confusedly benevolence and crime, /And one may for that, compare you to wine." Beauty is no longer an ideal accepted by everyone: the strangeness of things become her focus. Elements of Eros and Thanatos pulsate from her work. Ultimately, her world explores the subject of photography itself, as she scrutinizes her subjects—and herself—through the lens and defines new ways to look at eroticism and sensuality.