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HETERONIMOS - Gregorio González
10 September - 24 October
The Heteronyms of Gregorio González The anti-mimetic impulse was the common pattern of a series of abstract movements which, during the 20th century, defended a linguistic refinement and formal reduction. This circumstance tarnished, in many ways, the understanding of painting beyond some pure values that only refer to themselves, as postulated by Greenberg. The abstraction, as a more or less organized arrangement of forms and colours on a plane, became a synonym of visual truth. So the language was annihilated by its own grammar and behind the sign, divorced from its content, there was nothing. Gregorio González’ painting, due to its abstract –and, therefore, supposedly true- formulation, breaks the limits set by the formalist orthodoxy to highlight its re-presentational character. The works gathered here constitute small stagings where the painter pours his inner rhythm, with its pauses and silences, on a series of pictorial conflicts. According to Pessoa's heteronym Bernardo Soares, “art is the communication to others of the identity we feel with them”. Forms and colours emancipate from the place set by modern tradition and spread on the extended field, changing from flatness to volume. This way, a kind of scenography is generated –restructured as an agora or a place for exchange- and populated by a few heteronyms or isolated individuals that rise vertically, with the spirituality and dignity of a totem. These other selves of the artist talk among, but also inside, themselves; because in the core of each plane that structures the polyhedrons, there is an inner communication between a series of elemental geometric forms and a collection of rhythmically contrasted colours, like in a musical variation. Each surface adds an autonomous representative fiction that can be extended to the adjacent plane or not, but that, in any case, claims its own vision. Our eyes, incapable of guessing what is on the other side, must walk on the different planes to fully seize the work, like an architectural landscape. The initial conflict, originated from the chimerical union between flatness and volume in a painting seeking its autonomy, has reached a balanced point that the artist is questioning again. The heteronyms, once they are independent from the wall, end up returning to it, after learning that the painting, as representation, allows us to work with the impossible. Consequently, there is an inversion of the abstract values, which acquire a certain metaphysic quality. The painting back to the wall, shows an interest for the misunderstanding and the trompe l’oeil, developing a perceptive game between the ambiguous and the elusive which gives us a hint of the author's ludic attitude. The mise en scène ends up becoming a mise en abîme, and the heteronyms, back to the bidimensional plane, shape a new agora that shows the comedy of art. Gregorio González troubles with the pictorial medium to develop a personal grammar, which is disciplined, noiseless, intuitive but calculated, always conflictive, and settles an abstract thought located beyond merely formal values. He inscribes life in forms and colours on which the seduced eye rests and finds rest, inviting us to search for the semantic appeal that links what is represented with its inner rhythm, always with a will of silence. As Bernardo Soares expressed in his Book of Disquiet, art is also an isolation, because “every artist should seek to isolate others”, this means "to fill their souls with a desire to be alone”. Marta Mantecón
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