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Textos & others

Curated by
Madrid. Sunday, 19 September 2010
TWO FLIES TALKING ABOUT THE MICROCOSM AND THE MACROCOSM
Text for the exhibition catalogue TU AMOR ME DA HAMBRE, Luis Gordillo & Arturo Prins. 15 years of dialogues. Curated by Oscar Alonso Molina and José Luis Serzo. La lisa Contemporary Art Gallery 2010
Two flies talking about the microcosm and the macrocosm, or about an unusual exposure in a strange place in the spot
Fly 1: -I have just passed through the hall, they are already setting up the exhibition; they are a bit hot but you can see them with a certain contained euphoria…

Fly 2: -It is not for less…mmm…did you know that one of the principles of the millenary book The Kybalion, is the principle of the correspondence…? That says: “As above so below; as below so above.” Maybe it’s too pretentious to take this great premise to comment on what’s going on in there, but it’s suggestive to comment on the play, don’t you think?

Fly 1:- But you’re so pedantic, the little philosopher fly…

Fly 2:- The licensed lady spoke!

Fly 1:- …I’m sorry, I’ll shut up… it was a joke, go on… continue… you always come up with very suggestive analogies; although I don’t know what you mean by such correspondence; it is true that a long friendship and mutual admiration unites them, but the generational and aesthetic distance is evident…

Fly 2:- At first sight yes, but if you look at many other things that give away such correspondence, moreover, we could be in front of a contemporary case of “master/disciple”.

Fly 1:- That’s a hell of a thing! That’s a lot of imagination and other nonsense. We would be facing a case like that if an exhibition had been set up with Gordillo and some young painter of a more evident influence, like Daniel Verbis or Maria Acuyo, Ismael Iglesias or Cesar Delgado, don’t you think?

Fly 2:- Yeah, are you sure? You were always too quick to judge things… You stay in appearances, on the surface… I know what I’m talking about, I know this guy well… And of course he is not someone with an evident influence from anyone in particular!, his work is very personal, and there lies the interest of the relationship between both. But I’m sure you’ll be able to look back at Arthur’s entire work and find revealing links…

Fly 1:- Woman, I don’t have such a good memory! Besides, Arturo has millions of paintings and drawings…

Fly 2.- Well, look at their website again! What about “Celestial Balls ML”, “Antakarana”, “Childrenbaroque” , “Inside Bothside”…

Fly 1: Well I do not know what you mean, are works of their beginnings, and perhaps if there are influences of Gordillo, but also many others, such as Schnabel, Winters, Uslé … although it is true that these works are perceived forms ovular, embryonic and / or cellular that could be understood as the remains of a seed that flowered with the same essence but evolved with his own experience …

Fly 2: Exactly, Gordillo sowed a lot of seeds in a lot of artists from different generations and we can find links not only in those concrete forms, but in many other plots…in these first works of Arturo the concept of abstraction usually represents germinal states of existence. In the same way that Gordillo seems to be disseminating with a scalpel fragments of an invisible material reality, in Arturo’s work we see an attempt to analyze and represent original states of life at different levels of existence, whether it be uterine or cosmic.

Fly 1:- Although Gordillo’s work is much colder, more hermetic, more calculated…, it seems to be di-sections of a frozen artificial life… and although it has an inheritance of certain surrealistic automatism and a contained abstract expressionism (which can be seen in these drawings of the exhibition), I still see an enormous distance in the way of approaching the work and executing it…

Fly 2:- It is true, Arthur has a much warmer, spiritual and vivifying tendency, let’s say, with fantastic, religious, magical iconic influences… but another revealing heritage of Gordillo in his work is found in the symmetrical structure images, of shot down planes like the famous Rorschach test… If Gordillo moves in a post-Freudian terrain maybe Arthur will do it in a post-Jungian one, don’t you think? This exhibition unites the mental and the spiritual with a metaphorical body that seems to come from a contemporary alchemical register…

Fly 1:- But you’re so pedantic…
José Luis Serzo