OCTOBER 1 – JANUARY 31, 2026


The Dreamers is proud to bring to West Texas the work of French photographer Abel Llavall-Ubach for his first solo exhibition in the US. Presenting 17 photographs spanning 17 years, « Ghosts Of Our Humanities » is a slow-paced, quiet and somber reverie capturing the gently haunting atmospheres of places found deserted. 


The identity and motives of those who left is not the focus here, rather, emphasis is given to what remains. Lonesome statues, still waves and overgrown trees, an empty street graced by the sun. Though at first one might be tempted to catalog the works in this exhibition as simple landscapes, viewers willing to pause and intimately converse with the photographs might start to perceive their more complex nature. 


Famed for his subdued portraits that humbly exude both the emotional and the stern,(e.g. Mathias Kiss or Barbara Chase-Riboud for The New York Times Style Magazine), Llavall-Ubach is, after all, a virtuoso at capturing the essence and soul of all things, living and inanimate. Therefore, are these empty streets and forgotten monuments indeed landscapes, or have they become ghosts through our humanity, our love, loss, and sorrows? Could they be the portraits of our now vanished emotions? Together, the photographs constitute a deeply personal form of meditation, blurring spatial and temporal landmarks in a melancholic and contemplative atmosphere – the signature of the artist’s photographic vision.


Abel Llavall-Ubach (b. Paris, France) is a French photographer who specializes in Press photography, notably portraits. His language as an artist is heavily influenced by the early days of his career: then working as a videographer for a national political TV channel and internationally renowned contemporary dance and theater companies (Théâtre National de Chaillot, Paris), his fondness for portraiture grew rapidly and soon translated into photography as a new medium of predilection. Llavall-Ubach draws from his experience with moving images and stage performances to construct a photographic realm where scenography is ever present, whilst subtly revealing the individuality and singularity of his models thanks to unexpected chromaticities. Preferring softness to sharpness, grays to bright colors, the peculiar lighting that has become a signature of his work is in direct contrast with the rigid codes of classical studio portrait, bestowing his imagery a sense of eeriness, and the languishing feeling that temporality as we generally conceive it might not be as it seems. Llavall-Ubach approaches landscapes, still life, and portraits (whether in absentia or with figures depicted in the flesh) in a similar fashion: ethereal, spectral, removed from seasons, hours, and time altogether. Whether for magazines or more personal and intimate series such as the ones featured in this exhibition, a recurring subject in his body of work are monuments and places captured empty of human presence, where the traces left behind are the only clues of a once existing life. 


Llavall-Ubach’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Télérama, L’Obs, M Le Monde, etc. His photographs have been part of group exhibitions alongside artists such as John Baldessari and Robert Longo (Melancholia, Galerie Dilecta, 2017) and his atypical style of portraiture has seduced the organizers of Paris Fashion Week, who regularly commission the artist for behind-the-scene images. Most recently, he founded and launched Collectio(n), a platform dedicated to his documentary work on history and heritage. 


He lives and works in Paris, France. 

« Ghosts Of Our Humanities » is his first solo exhibition.