Antonio Freiles, Under construction #3, 2016. Oil on canvas, 120x100.

“I was sitting in that house of glass with brush in hand and then began to dream – the way it should always be at the start of painting.”
— Hundertwasser

I think any artist’s journey begins from the loss of every fixed point, from a zero degree. The most immediate thing to face then is matter, prior to any determination, any identity, any sign.
It seems that my work consists in the knowing (beforehand) and in the bringing out (then) of the symbolism concealed in the folds of the material, articulating it in extended or reduced colour fields. Making the illegible readable, pronouncing the indescribable, but without being able to consider it, by its very nature, definable once and for all. Hence, the dual, both temporary – work in progress – and, at the same time, planning nature of the series of four oil paintings, all made in 2016 and entitled Under Construction. They are rectangular paintings, 120x100 cm, dominated by an absolute gray, a uniform oil colour devoid of emotional or subjective nuance. If, from a rational viewpoint, like Alberti’s one-point and linear perspective, the frame/window in which our optical view as observers is projected can rationalize and symmetrically organise all that can be seen and experienced by the senses from a fixed view, the circle, the archetypal principle to which this series of works is dedicated, plays an entirely different function. The point towards which everything converges, and that I am interested in highlighting, is the centre of the canvas, corresponding to the centre of a perfect circle, from which invisible rays branch out. This is where the geometry, emerging in other works as squares or rectangles, creates the space and thus geography: the centre of the circle is also the centre of the world, the destination of ceaseless movement that can be measured in space. But also, as the image of swirling and repetitive turning, in time, like Rudolph Arnheim’s ellipsoid line or the Möbius strip. The artist is displaced with respect to this centre, which appears inaccessible, unreachable, but always desirable, perhaps because it is the place from where you can sink into that particular dimension that belongs to us and that we call “existence” in a kind of centripetal escape. Perhaps because it is an illusory moment beyond history in which the krónos, human time, is transformed into kairòs, eternal time.
Using a two-dimensional and three–dimensional language enables me to investigate different kinds of movement in space, such as twisting, tension, expansion, and overlapping, translating them into geometric shapes. As homage to European literary and artistic tradition, they are also and above all metaphysical figurations: the visible passes by way of deconstruction to exploration, through the circular sign, of empty space, of a boundless possible.
This circularity occurs again in a continuous variatio by the different sizes and plays of overlapping in my works, whose titles may suggest a rhythmic arrangement in the sequence and arrangement of the images (Under Construction #1, Under Construction #2, Under Construction #3, Under Construction #4)