Principio interior (Interior principle)

JAVIER BASSI (1964). Painter. He initiated his studies with Pierre Fossey and José L. Montes, attended the School of Architecture, and studied in France, after he obtained the Paul Cézanne Prize. He travelled through Europe, Africa, Mexico and the United States where he carried out multiple artistic residencies. He was selected for several Uruguayan consignments abroad, and also received awards such as the Paul Cézanne Prize. His production is characterized by a stripped-back painting of large format, made of very subtle grays, crossed by a romantic intonation that, at times, reaches high emotional tension. His works are coherent and absolute, to the extent that their expressive power —which goes so far as to dispense with thematic support— “is pledged in favor of the strictly beautiful and invites us to pledge or reject, or stresses those impulses”. Principio interior (Interior principle IADB#2004.23) shows his characteristic self-absorption and obsession in the representation of dense and tense plastic worlds. They are places which, far from any feeling of lightness, seek to generate a sense of redemption and extreme power, while transmitting a sensation of tranquility and contemplation that still believes in the practice of art “as a restorative presence, of reencounter, in its possibility of reinvention, of reflection, of discovering the internal space of things”.