Gallery façade. November 2021.
Casita, 2021, 200 x 210, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Exhibition View.
Bote hinchable, 2021, 120 x 104 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Exhibition View.
Exhibition View.
Paisaje Rayado, 2021, 200 x 246 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Exhibition View.
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Milk kills, 2021, 90 x 70.5 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
¡Ojo! Barriada, 2021, 70 x 66 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Exhibition View.
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Exhibition View.
Desguace, 2021, 200 x 203 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Trofeos, 2021, 200 x 212 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Rueda, 2021, 200 x 216 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Avión brrrrrrrr, 2021, 70 x 57 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Christmas ever, 2021, 74.5 x 72 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Paisaje Rayado, 2021, 200 x 246 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Paisaje Rayado, 2021, 200 x 246 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Casita, 2021, 200 x 210, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Carrito bebé, 2021, 150 x 157 cm, photographs, acrylic, marker and wooden frames.
Exhibition View.
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Information
JUAN UGALDE
Mental collages and other matters about the cingulate cortex
From November 20th to January 29th 2021
The artist Braco Dimitrijević states that, observed from the moon, there is no distance between
the Louvre and the zoo. For a similar reason, perhaps, Juan Ugalde has been playing for more
than forty years to level out what we still differentiate as high and low cultures, a division that
Vázquez Montalbán already challenged in the late 60’s when he said that «programmers of the
divorce between elite culture and mass culture will die under the weight of elite culture’s
massification. »« Polke, Salinger, Zappa, the Japanese, the Indians, La Mancha, the Chinese,
Bosch, the illiterate, chance, whether we like it or not, everything has to do with everything. » At
least this is what Ugalde used to say back in 2000 while introducing an exhibition, or maybe
describing a working method that explored a lot of that. But of course, all of it came from far
back, and it is perfectly visible in the way he and his colleagues at Estrujenbank were able, at the
end of the 80’s, to go from theoretical enquiry to satire in his observations regarding topics of
varied nature: the countryside, AIDS, the guillotine, illiteracy, or macroeconomics, among others.
Estrujenbank also used to say that «every nostalgic return to the past is a symptom of fatigue
towards the present and, at the same time, an alarm signal about something that is
disappearing». Mental collages and other matters of the cingulate cortex is presented as a body of
work that, although in its inaugural stage, works by following the inertia not of many of those
concerns that Ugalde, Cañas, and Gadea referred to, but of the way these were approached.
Years and decades have passed, and the romantic notion of Global Village coined by McLuhan in
the early sixties has been taking us towards the worst possible case-scenario. That is perhaps
why the figure of the illiterate, already reclaimed by Bergamín, it is today more necessary than
ever as a tool to keep imagination alive.
A quick search allows us to find out that the cingulate cortex is located in the brain, and that is
everything that surrounds and sits on top of the corpus callosum and, therefore, is part of the
frontal lobe. We also discover that its purpose is to solve the emotional conflict by suppressing
the activity of the tonsil and its outbound connections. To Ugalde, these mental collages are some
sort of workshop cleaning, because workshops are cleaned with brooms, but also with psyche,
and this accumulation of ideas whose origins are scattered along the last three decades are an
attempt to relocate many of those images partially built with memories, with his own and other
people’s photographic archive, and partially with scenes displayed and augmented in all
directions, which is what drawing and painting have allowed him to do to so far.
Perhaps it is that tiredness towards the present what has led him to rummage through what still
remains from before, and also maybe the fact that appealing to that emotional filter that is the
cingulated cortex, or gyrus, is actually a shield to protect him from himself, be it through the deep
knowledge of the way in which our brain achieves to dilute the images that belong to the
consciousness with the subconsciousness, or be it the way in which a boy closes his eyes to
avoid being seen. Seen or unseen, the question is that these new works by Juan Ugalde are
surprising not by the way the drawings, paintings, and collages that make them up have been
assembled, because this responds to, although taken to the extreme, the way he has always
operated; nor are they surprising because of the non-specificity of each one of his pieces in
relation to the whole, because there has always been a lot of that too. They are surprising
because of their/his ability to continue rummaging, to keep on establishing unlikely links that,
more than taking people aback, appeal to the insight of a viewer that thinks they had seen it all.
Each of these new painting is like an experiment table full of spare parts, and new possibilities
emerge from them and conjure up a childish smile in us.
If we took a few minutes to think about a painting by Juan Ugalde that we have recently seen, or
that we remember for some specific reason, I doubt that there is not a temporal, geographical, or
political disconnect that turns, just to give an obvious example, a neighborhood into a golf course,
or a palace’s interior into a roadside bar. Ugalde’s painting has been equally influenced by both
comic books and picture galleries, rock music, and high literature, but that is not what is
important, since all the historic avant-garde somehow mixed those mass and elite cultures
Vázquez Montalbán was referring to, but what is truly commendable is having achieved its dilution
through the elimination of strata, knowing to be in places so diverse, passing through them as
another one and giving everything a weight that equates them. In that way, facing the image that
his work reflects, one could assume that perhaps 13, Rue del Percebe has been more important
in this country when it comes to training the critical thinking of a generation than the faraway
effervescence of the generation of 1868.
Ángel Calvo Ulloa