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SUPRANATURA - Jayro Requena
11 December - 17 January 2009
City Heartbeats
The city is probably the most complex and interesting result of human culture. A city is fundamentally a sequence of intangible fluids (economical, spatial, emotional…) that are produced in an immaterial space and, in addition, that can be traced spatially. The traces of human life, of contemporary culture. The denser the city – especially as we Europeans understand it – the better, the more intricate and complex. The complexity, the superposition of constructions, of individuals, of interests, is the product of a capitalist culture, democratic, individualistic, participative, creative, innovative…Looking at these drawings, collages and paintings by Jairo Rekena I have come to reflect once more on these things. His approach to the urban dynamics is vital and complex. Though there is no human figure, the stratification of man’s action has been suggested in an extraordinary fashion, the speed of the urban is perceived in the vanish points of build horizons.
Paris and Venice are probable my favourite cities, since I am very sensitive to their beauty, the former a product of authoritarian planning, the latter of the conjunction of need and luxury; but I am captivated by lively and extravagant cities where individual desire arises and dynamism and passion are established. I would name New York and Shanghai, but also Las Palmas, Marseille and Rome, cities with neighbourhoods of thousand colours and where urbanites of all kind dwell.
In Jairo Requena’s latest works there has been a materialisation of very different forms that expressed his interest in issues like underlying structures, networks or self-generating geometric processes, as well as very sensitive approaches to the possibilities of visual techniques in which one noticed the talented artist’s hand. All of these searches are compiled en the works featured at the Nuble Gallery in Santander, joined by the agglutinative power of the urban. Today’s city is projected without limits by the hand of speculative greed, it is dislocated and reinvented thanks to the genious of an elite of architects and investigating city planners, it is humanised thanks to all of those who enjoy it…Capable of gathering the worst and the best, it is the place where everything happens, and where artists create and where they obtain the real image of our time, its heartbeat. Mónica Álvarez Careaga, Santander, November 29, 2008
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