from 7th november 2008 to 11th of january 2009

Aguascalientes, Mexico 2008

Tel. +52 444 99 15 90 43

Opening: 6 November, 2008, 20:00h.

Exhibition: 7.11.2007 to 11.01.2008

Aguascalientes city Museum

Zaragoza No. 505, Centro.

Aguascalientes, Ags. Mexico.

Momentary form. Momentform

Colour-Vision-Abstraction

By Laure Jarmouillé    (Trad. Clara Stern)

The desire to experience the present moment “effectively” is unrelated to the development of a system that helps us understand that experience a priori. In other words: we cannot be taught how to “live the present”; the moment is something that happens within the very act of living, it is built on its own becoming. Something similar takes place in the field of art, in which a painting entails a place ―it limits an experience― where form produces itself. It is form that suggests content in a painting, all the more if it is an abstract form that intends to escape the action of our memory (figural or symbolic reference) by favouring a concentrated attention to the present. Within painting, the abstract space constructs a symbolic play that produces an “unfolding of the moment”, meanings ramify: the observer participates in the creation of the work by ascribing a momentary weight to the forms, to the colours and strokes perceived on the canvas.

The components of a painting ―the “material”― entail a development, or rather they propose a reading of the space painted on the canvas. Observation becomes a prior act to any attempt of a conceptual organization. The abstract in painting leads to an equilibrium of perception: for the painter it is a balance between the material and its articulation; for the observer, the balance is more precarious since the reading adds an interpretation to the correlation between these two aspects. The work of art is formalized in an oscillation of the elements, which goes from the painter to the observer.

The expressivity in a painting can be perceived by an observer without the need to follow an analytic or syntactic preestablished procedure. However, the attention factor is crucial, a direct look at the events that ‘happen’ in the painting. The work of art entails a temporality; here we recall the concept of temporality that the American composer Morton Feldman called Momentform, in which the abstract space of a work (musical or pictorial) is conceived from a precarious equilibrium between perception and the creation of new meanings produced by perception itself.

Ordinary Instant, Why Patterns? (Momente I), Passing Shadows, Momentform I

The works presented here were produced in 2007-2008; they include large format paintings which recall some characteristic traits of the style of Enrique Fuentes. We can appreciate, for instance, the presence of a central figure in the form of a great dome. This figure suggests both a human part and a structural part (animal structure, mineral structure, spatial structure…), it does not surrender to a full definition, and it causes the synergy among all the elements within the work: the dome absorbs everything that surrounds it, but it is also a vanishing point that creates extrinsic conditions to the space of colour. Reintroduced from a new perspective every time, the exploration of multiple shades of colour has been a topic in Fuentes’ work. In this new set of paintings, the gradation of shades acquires a spectral character: the manifest use of a broad range of light that produces contrasts between dark and light shades is much more elaborate, and leads us towards the sensation of multidimensionality of the forms. This is unquestioningly one of the main features to highlight in this series, and in Fuentes’ most recent works. The traces of geometric breakdowns ―a feature that has also been present in Fuentes’ work since the very beginnings of his artistic production― is visible here once again. This time it does so in the form of wide spaces or blocks which are interrupted by the edges of detailed lines and scattered dots of paint, like granulations of various colour textures. The most current works of the artist seem to be more gestural, and they have a multiple character: they can be perceived as a global entity but at the same time they invite us to pay close attention to detail.

Fuentes has often approached art from alternative perspectives. Music and cinema are of equal importance to him in the building process of a work of art. These two other art forms broaden his pictorial discourse based on concepts such as editing, movement, temporality, improvisation, sequence, and so on. Thus we can see how in Fuentes’ work, and particularly at this exhibition, spaces are constructed ―just as graphics in a Feldman score― through notations. Notations group themselves together in the painting according to the function they perform: some are determining factors, as light and opaque spaces; others are more flexible, as edges, and others indeterminate as events ―joining points between blocks of colour and line― that impart movement to the painting. The temporality of the work is created based on an improvisation of events, as we would find in processes of musical improvisation in which the written score does not limit interpretation but rather suggests itself as a guide for the performer to build on. The articulation of the pictorial elements in the paintings at this exhibition has a light and elastic quality, a fugitive character; its narrative is not linear, but rather static, in a constant transmission of momentary form.