Gallery Facade. September 2024
Information
Nicolás Ortigosa. Obras/works. 2019 – 2024
From September 12 until November 8, 2024
Stormy black
Exhibitions are full of rumors and stories. Depending on how a certain story is told, the urgency to think about the complexity of what the exhibition communicates and the need for the gaze to go beyond the obvious will open up. In this crossing of meanings, rumors, and dilemmas are triggered. For Nicolás Ortigosa, exhibitions happen during the development of the work. They are neither an excuse nor a goal. He does not premeditate them. They do not contain a thesis or a specific theory, although his paintings are usually grouped in series. Everything is a murmur in the room, like that which precedes storms. It also happens to him when he talks about his work, which he approaches while at the same time distancing himself from it. His writings, which we exchange to share ideas, pose an intellectual challenge: they often require a re-reading as attentive as the calm contemplation required by his black paintings. The austerity of his writing could be equated with the sobriety of his painting, as it provides an introspective, silent, and serene experience similar to that produced by his work.
He confesses to being stubborn, demanding, and disciplined. An artist who dances between thinking and doing, although there are other verbs that better define his artistic work: to be, to remain, to vibrate, and to observe. Above all, to be patient: to wait. It may be years or it may be decades. Those that mark the beginning of his career are called Cuadros tapados (Covered Paintings). The dates they cover are from 2002 to 2018, from when he started his career until he decided to make a radical change: to cover up the paintings he had painted until then in black. To negate painting or, as he says, to let it happen.
Everything that has happened since that date is what we see here now. The title is the roadmap: Works/Works 2019-2024. A clear title, full of rumors and dilemmas. Its story is intimately related to the works of the preceding series. It is not in vain that the canvases we see in the exhibition also have something of old ‘discards’: black paintings that the artist leaves against the wall of the studio waiting to know what to do with them: whether to include them in the series of Covered Paintings or take them to another pictorial place. He talks about it as if he knows what that place is, yet he is unable to name it. That is what happens here when he decides to remove the frames and leave the canvas bare, full of creases and marks from the black spray paint and varnish with which they have been painted. Not only do they appear on the edges, but when the layer of black spray paint and varnish is manipulated, it appears broken or cracked, as if this gesture of removing the canvas from a frame were the very exercise of painting.
The former black calm of the first canvases, without sound or image, is now like a buzzing sound. At times they resemble mental maps and at others, they resemble future landscapes. He says that he subjects his work to a strong critical charge to revive places already traveled and try to find new paths in them. Many times, these paths are indirect and move in that temporal strip similar to that of the lightning that announces the thunder. He calls this distance ‘balance’. For the artist, structure is fundamental as a method of creativity and identity. More than one story or another, the first thing he wants to share are his previous concepts: everything that drives and delimits his project. Painting as something central, frontal, regular, and repetitive. Painting as a correction.
That is what orbits this exhibition. Like his work, it is done based on action and time and is also constructed in the not doing. In this tense resistance, he seems to pursue a total erasure, a disappearance of painting. In other words: by covering his paintings, the artist finds painting. Ad Reinhardt used to say, in connection with black, that the dark is ‘what remains’. Emptiness. The night is the mother of all things, like a veil of stars.
Bea Espejo