Picture sunset/Sunset/Park with benches

This work of I. Muro is unsettling in its subversion of any possible natural aspect of space that is nonetheless shown as motif: the Taconera Gardens of Pamplona, a place where Muro has returned in at least two other works —Imagen en el vacío (Image in a vacuum) and, two years later, Camino de luz I (Path of light I), in 1997.
The piece is part of a line of work that the author has already shown on numerous occasions: the representation of light, and the significant reflection of this natural element. In Cuadro atardeciendo (Setting sun picture), Muro adopts some stylistic conventions from Pop art: he replaces tonal variety with the limitation of pigments and the slow chromatic transition with flat contrast. He nonetheless still describes the motif, presenting it in a concrete space, although he does impose on both a particular objectivity or coldness or distance. However, it is striking how this impersonality is at the same time misrepresented. In the same work, the artist introduces diffuse masses and glazes as well as impastos of overlapping colours which lead to a feeling of beating light If Muro attacks the stylistic unity of the picture, his action still make sense. In fact, it is not the light that is presented: as constitutive of things (in the abrupt colour transitions), as the reality (in the glaze), as instant overhanging objects (in the highly saturated and extremely bright spots) for a moment. One should recall here a significant phrase of the author: I am interested in light, he said, “not as an isolated instance, phenomenon or impression, but as a substance of which everything is made.”* Nonetheless, Cuadro atardeciendo can only be an example of this willingness in a certain sense. The piece does not point to the total dissolution of man in nature. In many areas of the canvas the artist (like the viewer) is aware of the artifice: constructive light. And as many other times the artist (as if after the viewer) knows the moment of reflection, the rewarding light precisely condemned to disappear.
If light plurality is a basis for this canvas, the chosen iconography is not trivial in its significance either. Nature is a tamed, humanised nature. We are talking about a garden. The garden also insists on presenting its condition, as it is inhabited by a human figure slowly crossing it. In my opinion, Muro offers a significant reflection that he develops around light, but on the inside of our most common, everyday course.
Amaya Ascunce Parada