Yturralde and Torner, the summer of the line

Basin,

“My intention has been to achieve an atmosphere of fluid transparency, of communion with a certain energy in slow expansion; this energy refers to sensitivity and emotion, a poetic experience. Perhaps there is a spiritual or mystical aspect, but I do not believe that it is specifically religious or sacred: the sensuality of life simply, the here and now of this event.” This is how José María and Turralde explained a decade ago the aura of his paintings, marked by textures, contrasts and chromatic transitions and by the reflection on the universe and the notion of vacuum: in their compositions the lines and the occasional geometric motifs as the spaces that surround them are usually charged in their compositions.

Among its most recognizable series are Horizonsin which he explored through color, matter and texture the ideas of time and infinity, or Eclipsea tribute to Malevich initiated in the nineties in which he worked from nothing and silence. When raising issues related to the cosmos, the conquense uses the numerology and concepts linked to both art and science and metaphysics: it believes in the value of energy, light or the incidence of its own time and space in creation and in our lives, that is why their work seems to combine contradictory ways: the scientific and the transcendent, the reasoned, the reason.

José María Yturralde. Enso, 2024. Artist's collection

Similar concerns has overturned and Turralde in their work on paper and they dedicate the exhibition that, until next October, dedicates the Spanish Abstract Museum of Cuenca, the city where he himself was born: “A line of paper”. It consists of diverse pieces, which have as a common link the aesthetics that is their own, and their inclination to the cosmic, but respond to very different creative processes: these are drawings, models, essays, comets, preparatory drawings for their pictorial series, delineation and color test Complutense University calculation, active in the late sixties and early seventies, to the last digital impressions of the series Enso.

All of them respond, however, to the conception of the artist of his production, and of the procedures for the elaboration of the same, as roads of knowledge towards open land both to science and art: being the result of travel, studies, personal experiences or detained observations, have been consolidating their profile as a creator in which geometric rigor and propensity to order are compatible with the celebration of the possibilities of the color and the study of those key issues of physics or astronomy.

José María Yturralde. Generation of variations of hexagonal impossible figures, 1968. Artist's collection

José María Yturralde. Without title, 1969. Artist's collection

Another geometric Conquense, Gustavo Torner, occupies this summer the rooms of the hung houses, in the year of his centenary. The exhibition “Sur-géometries, tribute to nine architects” collects as many serigraphs that this artist carried out in 1972, with the collaboration of Abel Martín, who stamps hundreds of the Sempere engravings. They pay tribute to fundamental, western and oriental figures, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, whose contributions were both theoretical and practical: Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Palladio, Juan de Herrera, Wendel Dietterlin, Kobori Enshu, French Boromini, Étienne-Louis Boullée and Mies Van der Rohe. He chose them for finding them some kind of affinity; His admiration for some was confessed.

This architectural tribute is explained by Torner’s deep interest in that discipline – he said in a good number of architectural projects and designed several – and can be contemplated in the Black room Of this museum, a space conceived by the same Torner with Zóbel in 1966 for that center destined to boost graphic production between authors of our country in the following decades, and with it the collecting of engravings, editions and books of artists and the knowledge of those graphic techniques.

Summary also perhaps, these nine images, the fundamental of your repertoire: the subtle and neat treatment of geometries, spaces, colors and planes, defining both or more of their ways of thinking than those of doing.