Joaquín Lara
Territorio desconocido #2
Unknown territory #2

Zas Kultur, Vitoria, Basque Country
03.28 - 05.29 2023


Painting to the rescue of a "moment" in the flow of the landscape. The register of a sense in the constant transformation of an environment that struggles to recover another equilibrium. The provisional; the arbitrary; the casual as a referent.

I am reminded of Marcel Mariën's phrase "before creation, God did not exist". What surrounds the work is the contingent, the fragmentary, the ephemeral, the "confused mass", the chaos. Artistic practice, like any other medium, through the synergy that emerges from the discovery, helps the author to glimpse the essential. The work is a microcosm where the author tries out solutions that unravel that "anima mundi", that harmony that lies behind the chaotic appearance of reality.

The artist is faced with a project without hierarchies, in constant collision, a mixture of spurious techniques that interfere with each other, collapsing the medium and the message. The different stages are superimposed in accelerated entropy, remnants of meaning drifting about trying to group and metamorphose. The artist, perplexed, makes a gesture and observes himself intervening. The event extinguishes the incipient order, very soon, silently, another order, this one more complex, but already bastard, without legitimation, clings to the object. Will it be aesthetically viable? The shipwreck is imminent, the work sinks into insignificance.

Dissonances, flagrant contradictions, rectifications... The amorphous consolidates step by step. Perhaps," as Adorno says, "one of the tasks of art consists in expressing the inarticulate and inchoate, the nonsensical and arbitrary from the perspective of the articulate and formed, without rationalising and socialising it". For him, "the task of art is not to create an articulated form, but to reinvent the amorphous and inarticulate.... Only by deforming or decomposing what has already been collectively formed in order to directly achieve formlessness, or by having the force of artistic will to directly illuminate the amorphous, can one grasp, even if only in the abstract, a certain semblance of uniqueness".

Back to the work, time has decanted its meaning, the full gives way to the empty, another cycle begins. The artist approaches the painting by whispering, his method consists of rehearsing and exploring as someone who cautiously penetrates an unknown territory.