VÍCTOR LÓPEZ-RÚA: TOWARDS A LANDSCAPE OF MYSTERY AND UNEASE
A job in continuous process of regeneration
The constant and honest reflection on the semantic, syntactic and formal possibilities of painting has been, since practically the beginning of his career, one of the fundamental signs of identity within the creative activity of Víctor López-Rúa. The pictorial language - I have already said and written it well - is a trade of lights and shadows in continuous evolution, with portentous capacities of self-regeneration and transformation.
Thus, in times when it may seem that painting should take a step aside in order to allow space and voice to other expressive strategies, the truth is that, on the contrary, it continues to show and demonstrate an enviable creative health.
It is in this context that, without a doubt, we have to place the gaze of López-Rúa. A look that seeks new avenues of pictorial creation without forgetting of course its own essence. In this way, it has been for some time, basically since the beginning of the second decade of our century, investigating new possibilities of expression and formalization from the main substrate of figurative painting.
Possibilities that have as a common denominator to prove that inexhaustible regenerative will of painting, but not from a simple and merely “new” perspective but on the contrary to demonstrate its enormous versatility and, at the same time, to connect with what is the core of art: its power of communication with the viewer.
In the 3D realm of painting
All this singular -and plural- purposeful cocktail led our artist to glimpse the expressive powers of Stereoscopic Painting.
Why not, asked López-Rúa, establish nodes and connections between this stereoscopic science, already begun in the first decades of the nineteenth century, traditional painting and one of the most rabidly contemporary audiovisual technologies such as 3D?
A reflection that would lead him since 2011, as we have pointed out, to start a research process aimed at linking these disciplines with the aim of providing the public with an absolutely novel perceptive and representative experience within the field of plastic in our country, in which almost only some Dalí incursions in the seventies could be counted previously. From his own experiences the artist himself will coin the term “Metapictoric Three-dimensionalism”.
It was, in short, an integral project that confronted the language of painting with Stereooscopic Science, the physiology of vision, photography, video and the latest digital innovations of 3D.
To give shape and visual content to these objectives I was going to use a very elaborate and laborious method that would result in a complex artistic installation. Several elements were necessary for its realization.
In the first place, and as an original matrix image, he had to resort to his own pictorial work. From this he created another pictorial work, practically identical to the first, except for a very slight change of point of view and that had to be visualized by means of a stereoscopic apparatus of mirrors.
As a last step within this process, a 3D video was also generated that was collected, frame by frame, with the competition of a camera the generation of that pictorial work (stereoscopic pair) from the beginning. In short, a complex procedure that would serve as a visual witness to the birth and development of the painting from the very emptiness of the canvas -as a metaphor for silence- to become an iconographic stage of the creativity of the painter.
This latter strategy will also have an added value in reflecting, by contemplating the summative process of brushstrokes, strokes and forms that ends up crystallizing in painting, on the dangerous and threatening “emergency syndrome” – if I may so qualify it – that dominates and conditions our contemporary society, preventing or, at least, undervaluing the calm, calm and pleasure of the laborious work, thought and, in short, done well.
The landscape as objective and subjective representation
In recent years the landscape has surely become the favorite locus in which López-Rúa weaves the composition of his paintings and places the characters who inhabit and sign it. There is thus a growing shift of these areas from a more domestic atmosphere or if you want even more intertwined in the urban, to a framework of situation in which nature, and therefore its artistic representation in the landscape, are acquiring an undeniable and - above all - evident prominence.
His work thus reflects on the landscape and is inserted within that field of observation and meditation (two words that inevitably always end up rhyming) of the nature of which Cicero already spoke to us: “Nature observation and meditation have generated art...”
On the other hand, the concept landscape -as Javier Maderuelo points out- is a construct, a mental elaboration that we make from “what is seen” when contemplating a territory, a country. The landscape will also be the continuum of cultural and aesthetic factors that define, sign and represent a territory, a place or a place.
But every reflection on the landscape, on nature, also involves a subjective, interior position, a look closer to the sublime than to the mere nature.
external reproduction of their physicality. “The sublime,” Kant will say in his Critique of Judgment, “is not contained in any object of nature, only in our mind, for we can become aware of our superiority with respect to the outer nature as long as we have been so with respect to our inner nature...”
Staged narratives
This duality, apparently objective and veiledly subjective, is what puts into action - and also in tension - the discursive mechanisms of these paintings. In principle, it seems as if the images he paints and the scenarios in which he places them respond to a simply pleasant, pleasant, playful temperature. As if in a way they were only following the indications of “luxury, calm and voluptuousness” suggested by Baudelaire and brought to the canvas by the great Matisse.
However, appearances – again – deceive and confuse us. Each of these paintings, as it also happens in the photographs of Gregory Crewdson, becomes a story in which, in a very subtle, almost imperceptible way, “something” happens. Something that cannot be explained logically or reasonably. An action, a gesture, a character – man or woman – a look, an inaudible voice, almost imperceptible details in most cases that propel them towards dimensions of meanings very different from those that at first sight could be read.
These strategies - which generate situations and contexts that we could perhaps call consciously equivocal - appear clearly in the set of works that illuminate the new series on which López-Rúa is currently researching and working. Works such as The Dream, Picnic, A walk in the forest (particularly transmits a special concern, very stimulating on the other hand), Brunch, Country trip, or also Siesta (a painting also full of mysterious and disturbing connotations, but at the same time inspiringly evocative).
By the art of the i(magic)nation they become a kind of micronarratives in which what happens is perhaps not what happens in the background, and that at the same time give room to different emotional levels and behavior: a larva and densified violence, an ambiguous message, an unexpected behavior, a strange scenography, a struggle of monologues, an ardent and guilty secret, an effect without predictable cause...
Paintings that, on the other hand, have been read from a fundamentally plastic and formalist perspective, have also been modifying their brushstroke and their color, to become a kind of chromatic mosaic that enhances the values of tones themselves and the dialogues between nuances. It is as if the way in which he applied color and pictorial matter caused both to fragment into a kaleidoscope full of tonal and luminous riches.
Francisco Carpio