Valcárcel Medina, art as moments

Valencia,

Born in Murcia in 1937 and formed in Madrid in Architecture and Fine Arts, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina converted time and space on the axes of his work since its inception. In principle, he worked especially in the field of painting to, from the seventies, develop large format interventions in urban spaces and, later, poetic interventions.

From the eighties, a more intense interest in architecture can be seen in this author: he undertook specific projects in real situations, such as the creation of a swamp, and also films, sound works, actions, architecture projects and artist books.

Neither in formats nor in content their creations are easily adjustable to the usual exhibition spaces, so the Murcia is not an artist anything suitable for commercial circuits. It is intentional: both its production and its attitude, very far from any Engolation, question our concept of the artistic, the mechanisms of its institutionalization and its relationship with the public, whom he seeks to interest in the channels of concern, the reflection on the unnoticed side of our environment or provocation.

That is the dominant note in the whole of its legacy, otherwise absolutely diverse: ephemeral projects are owed, such as audioguías that communicate points of view other than usual on certain compositions or candies made available to viewers in their “fall in 2009” in Reina Sofía, and also other works with a vocation of permanence.

He has sought, fundamentally, that his work does not become merchandise. It associates art to life and attitudes, not to anything that can be stored and collect, so it has never sold its work. He is not worried about the production of objects, but, if it can be described as production, that of situations in which they intervene the unusual, the random and the game.

This summer Valcárcel Medina stars in a sample in the IVAM Valencian, composed of recent work designed precisely for gallery 3 of this center. The project is called “The Movement of the Idea” and consists of an unpublished series of graphic pieces, formed by forty leaves of semi -transparent paper drawn in ink by its two faces, with symmetry as a subject.

Both measurement and geometry, linked to that notion of symmetry, have been very present elements in the artist’s journey, determined to aim at distances – the paradoxes – between our perception of reality and reality itself.

Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. The movement of the idea. Valencian Institute of Modern Art. IVAM

Since it conceives symmetry, as well as measurement and geometry, as a projection of unity and order that our brain creates from the reality we see, Valcárcel invites us to perceive symmetry and disymmetry games in forty exercises: when the leaves drawn by the two faces are found, when we see the drawing of the obverse it is affected by the transparency of the reverse and vice versa. In fact, each sheet has two drawings, one for each face, but what we see is neither one of them, but the superposition of both, whether on the one hand or the other. Thus, the first symmetry we start is that the two sides of a leaf, are two even sides.

These drawings or plastic exercises are accompanied in the exhibition a title and a concise description with which Valcárcel invites the public to verify if he can perceive those games, sometimes evident and sometimes at all, of said symmetry. These works assume a new manifestation of their love for the poetics of the event, its understanding of the work of art as an act or action and as a situation (place, scenario, context) to understand from its present. He has come to affirm that art must be so faithful to its moment that is the moment itself. And as such, versatile and difficult to catalog.