Catalogue

From Polyhedric Reality to temporal space technical transgression

Juan Zurita’s paintings are not even hung yet, but I can imagine the sense of space they will cause. Life-sized urban dwellers (whom I had no trouble identifying as being from Paris with its wide boulevards) pass by. They walk with long, fast steps, like silhouettes of people with names, for us anonymous, against night scenes lit up by shop windows and neon light advertisements. It seems as though the only ones who count are the ones who have the energy to keep up this rhythm, this big-city pulse.
Whoever moves doesn’t get in the picture. Keeping this sentence in mind, the artist’s registers are based on photography and, just in case there was any doubt about the magic moment when the camera clicks, he uses the register of video movement, in this case digital, which allows him to be even more selective and forceful, thus freezing the selected image. The pixelisation of the image, as it was when the project was first developed some years ago, disappears with the perfection of technology. Now the technique is cleaner and clearer, although the bodies and the clothes leave the shadow of their movement as they pass in front of the camera. After that he registers it onto the canvas, like a realist figurative painter, thus leaving an oil painting as part of a reality captured technologically. Why falsify technology? Freezing the image is taking it out of context. If the technological means registers it that way, why hide this truth?
My first impression on seeing three of his pictures at the Isabel Hurley Gallery so I could write this short text was, apart from observing the size of the passersby, which made me feel like one amongst them, was the tendency to reflect on the mix the colours produced in the eye. A comparison with the technique of the Impressionists and the optical studies of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century immediately comes to mind. Of course, it’s absurd to make such a comparison; we’re talking about a contemporary, questioning artist of the 21st century. Something is wrong.
Juan Zurita is simply faithful to that which he registers, which is to say a lot, not to what he sees, expects to see nor memorizes in the register between the look and what was seen; what is registered technically contains the images that our look collects and arranges. But this isn’t the truth. The truth exposed in the photogram hides the trail the bodies leave behind them as they pass quickly by. The neon light that doesn’t outline the contours, mixing the man-made, night time colours and making them look like sets in a film, like the magnificent One from the Heart (1982) by Francis Ford Coppola in which the city of Las Vegas is re-invented and shot in the film studios. The space suggested by the artist seems real and includes you in the setting. His work plays with the spectator making one take on the role of the third dimension as volume, surrounded by oil paintings, imitated in digital form, in his most essential appreciation, most primary in the play of lights and shadows, people, movement, frame and contrast. Pictures taken from an image captured through a technical discipline, whether it be a digital photograph or a digital video, and faithfully transplanted to the traditional painting format of oil and canvas with which artists have expressed themselves in the Western world since the 15th century.
Times in history don’t seem to have any importance in his work. He mixes today’s techniques with those of the past; time in the fragmentation of the frozen moment doesn’t have time limits because he expresses the trail left behind the movement, and that the static, bi-dimensional space of the picture gave it tri-dimensionality and movement with a confusing special distance between the two planes and the body, between our static existence as observers and the picture.
I think the work as a whole gives a sense of virtual transportation, playing with the elements of the present reality like matter - his paintings - taking us to the anonymous no-place in the space of the city, with anonymous passers-by in movement or, if you discover the boulevards of Paris registered digitally and painted by the artist/transgressor Juan Zurita in 2008.

Clotilde Lechuga