Catalogue

Interrupted Sequences

Extracts and arrangements of the chat between José Mª Alonso and Ignacio Rejano about the work of Juan Zurita. Málaga, October 2008.
Temporal physical spaces arrested in timeless physical spaces could be a description of the work of Zurita.
But if he tells us of moments and freezes the moment for us in a surrounding narrative as if it were a frame and where the horizontal sequence, obviously continuous, follows the film and looks sideways to make sure we see the key points, the keyframes; inflections between different spaces defined by the contained opening of the frozen frames, intervals at the same time as impulse for these spaces towards others where everything is transition.
A clear intervention in the exhibition space can clearly be objectified during the job of sequencing and Zurita intertwines these dimensions in each work, creating a curious and surprising network of doors, openings or escapes to these regions which should be sensed or even finished by the spectator.
Zurita doesn’t disdain his skills. All through his artistic development we perceive a subtle settling of his formal qualities. It is in the outline where he sharpens his tools: the figures become liquid. The technological palette, well administered, shows us its digital references. The noise, a basic component of his work, proceeding from a careful process from the compression of the video-image, is set in the permanent dialogue of comparisons with chemical photography, all taken by Zurita to distort our perception, making us reflect on the necessary updating,
thus allowing discontinuous packets of information to filter in towards the spectator, as part of the atmosphere, sometimes disturbing.
His continuous work on the outlines reaches unsuspected limits; resigning himself to what we can recognise as a personal spatial poetry in which the anonymous, depersonalized characters, undercovered silhouettes, populate a recognizably ur- ban space. His persistence, where once again we notice the digital paradigm, is constant during the 24 hours, which means that everything is registered, we are on “live” though this doesn’t hide nor impede the everyday landscape of the time- less urban culture, gloomy latent, silent figures that could rob you of your sleep, almost as if they were trans-generational urban furniture.
The formal qualities referring to the environment, the video, evolve from the crystallized “pixelization” towards more liquid-like forms, dissolving into the bac- kground, walking undercovered through it, and are shown to us like impressions of images frozen onto the canvas which is, in turn, an image of a space: the urban landscape frozen, a new way of posterized.
In the language of video compression we can appreciate how Zurita pieces to- gether his vision of time and the sequence of the spaces he’s referring to, non- existent spaces; they are really only transition spaces for Zurita. The choice of moment is the key, it is a keyframe, it is the key to tell us about these temporal time spaces, these interludes that aren’t there but we can see them anyway. They are a collection of interludes where the compositions are made up of Groups Of Images (GOPs) packaged by video compression, the keyframe is exactly that, the collection of still shots that registers the information common to the next group of images, so that, in a GOP, each of the images in the group only registers that information which differentiates it from the keyframe.
Zurita captures the path between the simulation of the pixel in the still shot, heir to the most sensitive, grainy analogous photographs, to the noise generated by video-compression creating these “watery manipulations”. The tremendous reduction of information shown in the image is directly related to the bit/rates of the data flow and the quantity of information that Zurita wants to show us. The keyframe is the main character in the captured moment, the captured image, now, in a different form.
Zurita carries on the adventure started by Gerhard Richter in 1962, when he based his work on photographs, opening a world which, as we can see, is still being explored. Richter used an apparently arbitrary distribution of colours by using a computer program in his photo-paintings; photo-based imaginings. In a different way Chuck Close became absorbed with digital patterns pixel-deep in his icon oil portraits in what we can now identify as a high-level language. Zurita’s keyframe follows up on Richter’s and Close’s investigations, among others, through his enlargements of images in movement, a conglomeration represented by the algorithm MPEG from which Zurita feeds.
It is MacLuhan who reminds us that all media only fulfills the truth of its predecessor. This means that we can consider photography as the register of extremely powerful action writing in time. Zurita continues the job with the newest means: digital video.
For José Luis Brea: “Taking a photographic image as a starting point is to maintain a shifter” and clarifies that by saying that “the conceptualist artists find a shifter which reverses the orphanisation of a system, that of art, to throw it over another, that of the real”. We believe that Zurita achieves it too, through a process we can recognise as the “de-orphanisation” carried out by the play of frozen spaces connected by their key still shots, not without weaving in a certain amount of intimacy and hidden subtleties, another interruption in his sequences.