18Libro_Sinestesia_completo-final

These are artists who examine the timeless, the invisible. In many of them,
just as in Monet’s works, the image emerges from the background. Light
constructs and dematerialises at the same time. Reality seems alien, as in
the video by Tim White-Sobieski, a New York-based artist with Polish roots
who explores the painterly possibilities of the moving image by examining
the advances in visual representation. Shapes tend to blur in the rhythmic
succession of images which accompany a sound piece that provides the
rhythm. In the video, images and scents act as resonances or vibrations of
different realities that we find in the air and water. It is not too far from what
Juan Uslé’s painting reflects. With photography almost always present in his
process of visual construction, either as an invisible support or as an explicit
technique in recent years, Juan Uslé works with painting as a means of
representing the intellectual and vital record of reality. In the text written for
the work Bonues Words, he tells how he left the yard and headed to the pool,
and how the liquid became denser and harder to go through. That seems like
a fantastic metaphor not only for the pictorial, but also for the dream and that
relationship with water that Bachelard described so well. It is the energy that
condenses and yet displaces the referents; dynamism. Uslé, who examines
like no one else the dialogue between the frantic pace of reality and the ‘self ’
which is diluted in vision, constructs a painting that is articulated in open series
which outline a discontinuous, fluid process, always based on saturation and
transparency, as well as an almost manneristic passion for gesture which harks
back to the expressionist roots of his painting. His is a painting of contrasts,
from the most fragile to the most robust, from light to thick, from the speed
of some brushstrokes to the slowness of others that betray a tense look at the
painting. Thus, each painting is a kind of pictorial threshold that contains an
unreachable message, a place of inwardness which in the light is the key figure
to generate that state of transition, that painting in the guise of an event,
similar to what we feel when we watch the video by Tim White-Sobieski or
gaze upon the wonderful garden painted by Albert Oehlen. In the latter, we
get the same feeling as in Monet of the absence of the horizontal line, as if
we were literally in the garden or the pond, permeated with its scent. Oehlen’s
painting is a dance that is simultaneously convulsive and gentle, labyrinthine
like the perfumed, primeval garden of Antonio Saura.
These works are inspired by nature and assume both the specific and the local, like
the works by Fernando García and Mayte Vieta. The silence of dead flowers bursting
with colour is what joins them with other still lifes, like the ones by Nuria Fuster and
Jannis Kounellis. Before them we feel outside time, and silence is contained as matter,
which takes on a radical presence. In all of them there is a respect for composition
and its traditions. A pictorial space takes shape, and materiality and its relationship
with architecture tauten, the space is planned and formalised through the objects.
The scent of colours appears on the threshold on the unspeakable. It
does so suddenly, as if it was violating the border of the impossible without
manipulating the matter, but instead letting it manifest itself. The temptation
of silence does not prevent space from being set to music, as happens in the
geometric burlap by Mark Hagen, which smells of earth and wood. Or the
poetic thread in the ambiguous painting by Richard Aldrich. The paint vanishes
like a smell, like colour, like Víctor Pimstein’s image about to be extinguished.
Painting, and sculpture, are an exercise of emptying, as if the goal were to find
the essential scent. We can see this in the box by Txomin Badiola, as well as in
the trembling painting by Jürgen Partenheimer, where colour produces a given
effect depending on its formal organisation and each individual’s psychology. But
if colour is important in Partenheimer’s works, so is drawing, or more accurately
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