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JUAN ZURITA – FUNDACIÓN CAI 2023
PARDONED TRANSITORINESS

 

In their beginnings, algorithms seemed intent on freeing humankind from repetitive and monotonous tasks. But artificial intelligence has moved into the realm of the singular, even the spontaneous. It is therefore significant that, in this time of undisciplined algorithms, some artists impose upon themselves disciplines of a monotonous or systematic nature, reclaiming for human craftsmanship practices that machines are already beginning to disregard. An intelligent vindication of painting today may lie in proposing a strict mechanics, in programming oneself, resolving by hand—with utmost care and the most exquisite inexactitude—what computers perform without error. A repetitive abstractionist such as the Chinese artist Ding Yi, who fills his canvases with crosses and X’s, declared that he finds in these practices a form of liberation.

Juan Zurita has always been a methodical painter. For some years now, his works have incorporated a grid of four colors—always the same, always in the same arrangement—covering the entire surface. Red and blue alternate in one column; in the other, yellow and green, and so on. Read horizontally, there is yellow and blue in one row, green and red in the next. This is the constant or monotonous element of the grid. It can be read as a fabric, a perfectly orthogonal design. The painter constructs it using masking tape and a great deal of time. The variable element is the color occupying the rest of the canvas—indeed, two-thirds of its surface. In the logic of the execution of these works, that is the first layer, whose reality is never offered to us naked but always mediated by the grid. In those backgrounds there are broad masses of more or less saturated colors. Their arrangement also tends toward orthogonality, although that norm is transgressed by nebulous behaviors. These forms evoke urban imagery—the banal footage of traffic surveillance cameras. These geometries are artificial, architectural. Juan Zurita first gained recognition for memorable paintings of cities at night, of light and people moving through the streets. His abstractions derive from that world.

The two realms described—background and grid—governed by such distinct principles, interact to produce optical effects that acquire special interest if we allow the gaze to linger. Color vibrates in certain areas; the grid advances or recedes depending on affinity or complementarity. The result is paradoxical: the grid (like a lattice) imposes a censorship upon the background, while at the same time conferring singularity and mystery upon it, imposing a certain cool eroticism.

Upon this background/grid duality, signs also develop. And here again, manual facture emulates digital modes. Once more, layers of simulacra accumulate. The trace of the mouse on the screen emulates that of pencil or brush. Not in vain are these—pencil, brush, spray, etc.—the icons proposed by editing software. Juan Zurita thus pictorially emulates prior digital emulation. A practice that in fact forms part of the DNA of modern painting almost since Picasso and his collages, and certainly since Roy Lichtenstein, who painted both the printing dots and the very brushstrokes of abstract expressionism, already transformed into graphic signs.

These scribbles convey a message devoid of viscerality, the product of a certain introspection, of a banal letting-the-hand-move over the mouse, in which one might imagine that, over time, someone will learn to read destiny as in coffee grounds. These signatures are white, as if they were the hint of an erasure process. As digital images, or drifting casual captures, the future seems destined to be disappearance. Painting becomes a rare pardon.

Alejandro J. Ratia