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Fueradcarta
“In Search of Meaning.” Presentation
Fueradcarta is a Contemporary Art project that explores everything that our work has in common. We want this experience to simulate a laboratory of ideas around Contemporary Art.
Proposal
Fueradcarta is formed by the painter Patricia Mateo and the photographer José Luis López Moral.
“In Search of Meaning” has been curated for the Fucares gallery, and is composed of small and large format work mixing different techniques such as oil painting, photography, and photographic transfers. These pieces have been created on different materials such as paper or wood. The show represents an exploration of our passage of time throughout existence.
BAGGAGE
Three artists were fundamental to the development of surrealism: Dalí -Lorca-Buñuel. José-Miguel Ullán. Surrealism also exists. El País, 28 October,
1994, p. 38
José-Miguel Ullán words serve as an example that not only illustrates a historical moment in art, but also demonstrates that collaboration between artists is a spring that has not ceased to flow, from Altamira to today. In conceptual art, from the end of the 1960s, collective works began to appear in which the creators, far from considering their work as a form of production, sought for them to be understood rather as an essential path that eliminates the sense of individuality inherent in the works of art. It is in this way that many artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Mel Ramsden or Ian Burn found a space in which to express themselves; a place where the self practically disappears. The Art & Language group, created in 1967 in the United Kingdom, was launched by the magazine of the same name the year before, as a working dialogue between Michel Baldwin, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, and Harold Hurrell. With more than fifty members, it is impossible to know exactly who collaborated on each piece, or which contributions were made by whom. The American editor of the magazine, the aforementioned Kosuth, took a firm stance against the concept of individual personality typically associated with art, whereby the artist’s signature is am element that differentiates one piece from another.
In this sense, the couple, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, under the collective named The Other, is the most evident and well-known case of extreme collaboration in the seventies and eighties. They acted as if they were twins. Their osmosis, rather than symbiosis, reached such an extent in one of their performances, that they both fell unconscious, having exhausted the oxygen in their lungs by each breathing the air that the other exhaled. It was like the possession and extermination of another person’s life.
There is no end to the list of conceptual artists who have worked or now work together, but I cannot fail to mention the Superflex group, the Boyle Family, the Harrison Studio (Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison), and Anne and Patrick Poirier, who made works referring to environmentalism, urban or rural landscapes, and even archaeology. Spain is notably home to the ZAJ group (Juan Hidalgo, Esther Ferrer and Walter Marchetti), as well as Concha Jerez and José Iges), with creations comprising texts, music and voice.
In the field of painting or the other arts, the works at the core of Equipo Crónica by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Rothko and the architect Philip Johnson, the singer Björk and the multidisciplinary artist Mattew Barney, the photographer Inge Morath and the illustrator Saul Steinberg, the photographer Philippe Halsman and Salvador Dalí, the photographers Pierre et Gilles, Pere Formiguera and Joan Fontcuberta, and more recently, Elena Cabello and Ana Carceller who form the duo Cabello/Carceller.
In each of the cases listed above, it is clear that there are common aesthetic interests that facilitate a certain work dynamic. Goethe, in his 1809 novel entitled The Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften), describes the need to incorporate the Other into the Self. The characters are united to perfection; each is part of its complement. It is the revindication of the Self through the Other. However, the unhealthy trajectories in the characters of the German narrative have nothing to do with the happy creations of our artists, Patricia and José Luis.
José Luis López Moral encapsulates the essence of landscape classicism using an iPhone application, iOS. He uses this operating system to record poetic images from the absolute veracity of a desert landscape. In his works, surrealism and romanticism spring from naked truth. Pictorialism overflows in the artist’s vision of the 21st century. His conception of the artistic process is not the result of spontaneity or the moment, but of an elaborate creation that begins in the hunt for natural matter, and ends in the abstraction of a pixel; a personal discipline where technology and craftsmanship go hand-in-hand, debate, and give their best; in the same way that he mixes the pure natural form with elaborate artistic references. It is no coincidence, then, that the branches of a Castilian elm are imbued in our retina with those of a British oak, or that the reflections of light on a lagoon in La Mancha evokes the banks of the Hudson. It is not so much an homage to Turner, Friedrich, or Cole, but the joint, indisputable praise of the natural environment which Lopez Moral side with through the centuries and the History of Art. And he does it his way and in his time, integrating technology, social networks and an ecological awareness of his home environment. The result is, as in the case of masters who preceded him, the sublimation of a landscape that is more than evoked – it is portrayed.
López Moral’s natural scenes inspire a romantic walk, philosophical reasoning, and the melancholic pleasure of lost paradises. They do not deceive, despite generating dreams; they do not suffer, despite lamenting in silence the weight of oblivion. The metaphor of the landscape so evident in his work acquires a special metonymic expression, capable of revealing the perfect simplicity of small things -a root or a branch- given the magnificent prominence of an entire forest in nineteenth-century English or American painting.
The passing of the seasons over the fields, that of the centuries over the stones, or the fleeting instant of a newly formed bud, sleep – unchanged and eternally beautiful. And they move us like the distant memory of a sweet song, staying forever in our eyes, carving out a niche in those complicated mechanisms that make up aesthetic pleasure.
His photographs are form and light, but above all, and most of all, texture. It is the faithful reflection of the skin and of the effect of time and life on them; what conforms their natures that may seem dead yet still hold the potential for rebirth.
His images are appealing, not because they present themselves as something else but precisely for showing themselves in the purity of matter and life. The harshness of the wild is softened with that unique light that arises between the haze and the dust, from the parchment-like heavens. It takes us into a dream, our own or someone else’s, which invites us to remember and reflect.
Everything is presented to us from the powerful silence of those undisturbed worlds to those places – as unknown as they are familiar – that do not need us to be beautiful.
Patricia Mateo uses oil painting to convey a style whose main source of inspiration is art itself: the History of Art not only seen, or revisited, but participated in by our daily life – not without humour or irony, perhaps essential elements in withstanding the stress of our daily lives. There is also a critical element, possibly also necessary to maintain a certain moral coherence in the world in which we live. This is the context underlying her remakes of the great works of the Renaissance, Baroque, Flemish Painting, French Classicism, or American Realism. Her interventions are like small changes that do not alter aesthetics but revolutionise ethics; a massaging of the pictorial message of past times. Patricia Mateo re-news, more than re-makes iconic works of art, without grandiose pretensions. Her painting don’t necessarily contain weighty phrases; sometimes it is sufficient to make us smile, but they are always designed to make us think.
In her handling of the works of the masters, Patricia Mateo knows how to combine respect for the past with new proposals and innovations; she remains faithful to the original image whilst making this compatible with her personal message, achieving a surprising conformity between ancient and contemporary techniques. In many of her works she separates herself delicately from the artistic icon in question, not only by incorporating contemporary everyday objects in the works, but also by bringing us into much closer proximity to the works, whilst remaining respectful of its original essence.
In this exhibition, Patricia uses oils to create fine veils -like the primitive Dutch artists- on Jose Luis’ photographic paper, incorporating elements, characters – or rather icons- from Brueghel, Patinir, or Bosch. Thus roots, branches, or lichens come to life, projecting a surreal dreamscape of impossible insects, of flying machines that transcend both time and space, but never the Art whose offspring they inescapably remain – their favourite children. The juxtaposition of the two worlds, that of Patricia and Jose Luis, constitutes a change that gives rise to a different reading by the viewer, or rather thousands of readings, depending on the retina and the intellect of the beholder.
Mateo’s pictorial interventions transcend time to restore masterful forgotten details, artistic atoms… that which Gilles Deleuze described as extrapolating not only dimensions but intensities. It is a giant step in their evolution. Metonymy is also at play in Patricia Mateo’s work on these paintings. The extraction and interpolation of a single element or motif of the remade work make it an icon in its own right, a total representation of the entire painting, artist, or even the movement to which it refers. In this way, a funnel is enough to allude to the entire Extraction of the stone of madness, offering a complete journey through Bosch’s dream; in this way, the white dress of the American mail-order cut-out suffices to evoke the entire rhetoric of commercial art of the mid-1900s.
Patricia’s work is a testament to artistic will and commitment, and confidence in one’s vocation; and is highly worthy of recognition in times such as ours, which are especially difficult for any artist and even more so, if that artist is a woman.
Patricia and Jose Luis met and admired each other’s works, their different techniques, aesthetics, and perspectives. They could have left it there, but instead, they started collaborating. With Fueradcarta they launched an artistic experiment – a laboratory of ideas as they say – made reality. With this initiative they seek to promote the collection of artistic works among the general public via small but carefully collated albums and notebooks that this joint editorial project also sells online, adapting to the times and the economic and spatial possibilities of hundreds of potential art consumers, finally understanding the collector as he or she is today.
Returning to the exponential, they represent two personalities, four hands, and perhaps more than eight different technological and intellectual resources, the amalgam of which leaves room, even in these current times, for daring, research, and innovation.
However, improvisation or in any old way, are very far from this intimate and creative space in which Lopez Moral and Matthew conceive their work, both in form and in substance. It is all underpinned by the core qualities of the two artists, matured over time like a good wine and whose sediments are composed of life experience, love of Art, talent, and knowledge of their profession.
The works of this exhibition serve as a stepping stone on the path to those other worlds, which rather than being in this one, inhabit our minds, our dreams, and our memories. Necessary baggage that leads us to a metaphorical reality, where everything is as it seems, and much more.
Jesús Camara
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