Madrid,
Two years after he premiered at the Fernández-Braso Gallery showing his series dedicated to the interiors and views from Torres Blancas, Félix de la Concha returns to this Madrid room to exhibit a set of works he made, again in plein airin the five years between 2009 and 2014, a period in which he resided in Iowa and in which he also carried out the conscientious reproduction of Las Meninas life-size whose execution process has been explained in the volume Las Meninas from an artificial light. Diary of a copyedited by Kingdom of Cordelia.
This lioness author has always worked on canvas and in the field of figuration, his usual genres being portraiture and landscape (both are represented in this exhibition), but above all he has created landscapes inhabited by architectures in which We will not contemplate human figures: the creators or inhabitants of these constructions are never present, although their traces are; these buildings, in some way, transcend them. Beyond natural settings and urban planning, in any case, the center of De la Concha’s production has been time: not only does he try to freeze his motifs truthfully in his scenes, but also capture the multiple versions of them that we They offer the times of day, the seasons, the changes in light and what, despite the changes, remains. The critic María Escribano said that hers is a combat against the mutable, in the openbecause this creator, like the nineteenth-century realists, almost always works outside his studio or, rather, he makes each place where he develops his works his workshop.
Facing many inclement weather (in the case of the United States, its very cold winters), the painter carries his portable easel and his tubes of color, settles before the chosen motif and, in fact, moves through two periods that pass parallels: that marked by the movement of clouds and the sun, by the more or less fleeting passage of a light that defines tones, and that of the immediacy that the creation of his fabrics demands, determined by the speed of drying. Choose to see yourself, in his words, forced to depend on that moment that if I don’t take advantage of it, it won’t come back; He is not concerned with precision in details, but with the harmonization of that lighting.
Despite this work without a roof, he has sometimes been developing in formats linked, in most cases, to the work in the studio: this is the case of his polyptychs, which he does not create with altarpieces in mind; rather in the seriality linked to minimalism. They offer you the possibility of displaying wider panoramic views of certain scenarios, or showing them at different times or delimiting areas; we see it in Seven moments of light in The Seven Brothers Farm on the longest day of the yeara set of canvases in which the continuity of the horizon is preserved but the clouds remain fragmented, revealing their mobility as the hours pass. In film terms, we would speak of a rupture of the fitting. In this type of compositions we can also detect the use of the Fibonacci sequence that Mario Merz applied or the notion of a creative diary, or that of an archive; Of course, the preparations for the creation of all his creations have to do with multiple walks based on observation, on the visual registration of places.
Even, as Armando Montesinos points out in the catalog of this exhibition, the largest piece now in Fernández-Braso, THE RULE OF 25. A farm on Prairie Du Chien Road: in the morning, at noon and in the afternoonwhich is made up of seventy-five images articulated in three groups, was carried out according to instructions that a performer who followed Fluxus could have established: When he finished each painting he moved forward or back 25 steps and painted a new vision from there. Group of 25 on the left: Painted in the morning. I moved down the hill, getting closer to the farm with each new frame. Group of 25 on the right: Painted in the afternoon. I was moving up the slope and away from the farm in the opposite direction. Group of 25 from the center: Painted at noon. Instead of doing a continuous route, as in the other two, I started at a point, in the middle, from where I moved alternately up or down. He always moved forward or back 25 steps between one painting and another.. Another number 25 determined whether he stayed home or not: the one with degrees below zero.
If any viewer is tempted to link these meticulous works to results typical of photography, they may be disillusioned; The artist affirms that he looks directly, the camera interprets involuntarily, that is why between its targets and those of a snapshot, in its very expression, there is no color. Furthermore, his frames are not established by a lens, but by the (subjective) turn of his head. The subtle variations of nature, perhaps, can only be carefully contemplated and translated by the gaze of the painter, who repeatedly confronts his motif and decides to take it to the surface, larger or smaller but small, on which he works, selecting the perspectives and the movements of his eyes.
In short, it is possible to understand De la Concha’s works in this exhibition, “IOWA”, as fragments of light, time and ways of thinking: it is an intellectual effort to sketch an accurate impression of the environment that also expresses its paradoxes, such as the frames within the frame involving reflections in glass or the tires of fast cars on slowly falling snow.
Felix de la Concha. “IOWA”
FERNÁNDEZ-BRASO GALLERY
C/ Villanueva, 30
Madrid
From September 12 to November 8, 2024
