After his last solo exhibition at the gallery, No morder la mano que te da de comer, in 2021, Quique Ortiz presents his latest works under the disturbing title Estoy mirando el infinito como animales muertos (I am looking at infinity like dead animals). Regarding this new project, and his practice in general, the artist writes:
‘In aesthetic theory, the sublime refers to an experience that goes beyond ordinary beauty and provokes a sense of grandeur, awe or admiration, it is something powerful and terrifying that brings out a strange sense of pleasure. Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke stressed the non-rational character of the perception of beauty. The sublime in art goes beyond the beautiful, it refers to the experience of the grandiose and the awesome that evokes a feeling of awe and elevation beyond the capacity of ordinary comprehension. The beautiful does not consist of harmony and order, but is a quality that directly permeates our imagination and senses. Sometimes, unconsciously, we are attracted to the grotesque, the sinister, the same thing that attracts us also repulses us. The sublime is less quantifiable, more complicated to explain, completely irrational, and, therefore, much more powerful than the beautiful, because it touches us directly on the emotional fibre. I try to resolve this question by meditating on the origin and why beauty is beautiful.
I consider it necessary and unavoidable to maintain an aura of mystery in painting. It is important for me that the work always contains some hidden space that we can never enter and that we cannot explain clearly. We sense beauty but we don’t know what elements make it up. We enjoy without understanding everything that makes up what we observe; not evident things are revealed. Nothing extraordinary is shown, but I explore the ordinary and start from there. There is no intention for what I paint to be understood, I am more interested in it working as an access, a narrative from painting as a process of free capacity to act.
The stopped time, the interrupted action and the mystery contained in each work, as if it were a photogram, are accentuated by a sequential disposition that demands from the spectator the questioning and discovery of a logic, of the sense of a possible narration or of a conductive thread that unites them. Transcending the frontier between the photogram image and painting from the study of the narrative. It is about the independence of the painting from the image through its plastic character. It is not a question of reproducing an image that already exists, it is rather an interpretation of it through the pictorial medium. Painting does not serve to produce the image, but rather it is the image that serves us to produce painting.
The use of images in my creative process plays a significant role. For me, the source image is a visual commodity that lends itself to reinterpretation through the pictorial medium. I do not see the image simply as a static representation, but rather as a living, plastic material that can be transformed and reinterpreted through the pictorial act.
My work is situated in a terrain whose basis is figuration and contains a narrative value, extended to the analysis of forms that emerge from the synthesis of the referent itself. The archive images act as a starting point, as a creative ferment. In them, the environments and figures belong to the everyday, but the way in which they are shown to us is charged with a certain unreality. There is a necessary desire to veil the real or to show the gestures of the non-concrete. The aim is not to reproduce the images faithfully, but rather to use them as a starting point for a deeper reflection on the very nature of painting itself. Working from the image serves to explore how the materiality of painting can dialogue with existing visual content, as a process of dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity, between visual memory and artistic expression.
I am more interested in the potential of these images to make people think, suggest or fascinate with pictorial elements than in the subject that they represent. There is no manifest interest in trying to narrate a specific story, but rather there is an enjoyment of a linguistic search in constant renovation.
The starting point of this search is the image. I try to exceed it so pictorial thing is the true protagonist, always based on his own specific and characteristic technique. In the game between paint and surface play, brushstroke by brushstroke, spontaneous works in appearance, but agile and careful, are created. On the other hand, the very material fact of the support, the treatment of the image, the palette and the material, give character, expressiveness and strength to the work. The material of the painting or the pictorial act itself introduce this tension between the pictorial character of the image and its obvious photographic origin.
The language is transformed from the specific to the suggestive, from the figure to the abstract, like a dialectical evolution of the gaze. Painting as an exercise of the gaze. It is, therefore, an artistic work that is related to the impact of a digital file that becomes a work of art. It acquires independence once it has been subjected to the gesture of interpretation and the free capacity to act.
My position is to defend painting and take back the best of it. I want to recover its poetic and metaphorical dimension, its capacity to excite, to vibrate. Perhaps it is not only the recovery of painting, its contemplation and enjoyment as a space for reflection, independence and, therefore, freedom. Perhaps it is also the search for the transcendent dimension of the sublime”.
Quique Ortiz
Estoy mirando al infinito como animales muertos
QUIQUE ORTIZ
13th February – 19th April 2025
Juan Silió Gallery
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:30AM – 1:30PM / 6 – 9PM