By UCAB Central Library
Centro Cultural UCAB
Fragility: matter of art itself
This sample is an integrative experience of the environment’s sensorial stimuli. Each and every one of the works exposed here are an invitation to test boundaries, conceptual and sensorial, where nature stops being an unfathomable multiplicity and it becomes a poetic, an aesthetical discourse. The exhibition is a great installment, a visual ecosystem made in situ.
“The natural and cultural context determines the man who inhabits it” VHI
"The medium is nothing more than a vehicle for the sensitive, conceptual and creative acuity of those who use it to manifest" VHI
"I do not advocate a return to the analogue. In times of plurality I believe that media interaction is an open possibility because, as Leonardo stated," art is a mental act "that is materialized in making from certain materials and traditional technical procedures or not. In the case of painting, such a situation refers us to the extra-pictorial, which speaks to us of a reality where the pictorial, not painting, opens up paths and possibilities for such a long-standing genre." VHI
Art does not have a specific origin and usually does not have an end
When does an artwork start? When does it end? It is not possible to know, the investigation in itself is useless. Perhaps we can say that Frágil had one of its essential moments in the artist's explorations through the Venezuelan Amazon. The sensitive qualities of nature surprised him in his encounter with the Yanomami landscape and culture. Immersed in such a cosmos, he discovered a different approach to space, shapes and textures. A different relationship with life. The ancestral inhabitants of the jungle taught him the properties of a particular sensitivity: "Those were my true teachers." The usual categories of Western perception yielded to a way of relating to space and time based on the enveloping, the ephemeral and the ritual. These attributes filtered into Irazábal's consciousness until they provoked what was exposed in Frágil: the design of a portal towards astonishment, the experience of a transit through suspicious limits to reason and, however, natural to a sensitivity that favors what ambiguous, indiscretion, the relative, the game, the free interpretation and the random.
"In Fragile, the original moment allows us to reach moments of bewilderment, of encounter with what reason does not know, but that we are capable of intuiting" VHI
“In the exhibition Fragile, I let the intuitive act to start revealing immediate spontaneous sings of primary meaning”. VHI
"Fragile is formed through an additive transit. A coming and going, a vital transit with the environment, where the moment, the process and the limit take on special meaning" VHI
"The glass walls, due to their transparency and reflective nature, materialize space and time in units where the transience of light determines the perception. On the transparent surface, like a palimpsest, a crossing of images is simultaneously manifested of the external and internal environment: registers, lines, strokes and reflections whose meaning remains open to the imagination "VHI
The work, the moment, the effect
Each moment or effect exhibited in the Magis room, since the work criterion is constrained for this exhibition, proposes to the participant-reader bonds with ancestral elements such as the petroglyphs of the aboriginal cultures of America, with contemporary poetics such as the readymade and assemblages , with qualities of nature such as textures and the decomposition processes of leaves, with botanical science and the infinite patience of naturalists, with the tradition of nineteenth-century explorers and draftsmen, and with the very matter of time. There is paint, wood, organic waste, fabrics, notebooks and intervened books, vinyl and natural fibers such as the chiqui chique from the Amazonas. There are signs drawn, materials mortified by the force of abrasion, utensils used by the natives, objects of ritual usage and sculptural volumes. Irazábal has gone through a great variety of intervention and composition techniques and methods: ripping, cutting, sanding, painting, staining, drawing, pasting, gathering, separating, balancing, unbalancing. Each piece has been thoroughly thought out and mortified with effort.
"The entire universe can be found inhabiting the space within a leaf. The leaves that make up this painting-installation are based on essential registers, spontaneous and profound gestures contained in hundreds of real leaves collected in the memory that imagines, in the memory of the emotions" VHI
“A footprint is the record of something that was, something that left, but is still alive in another way. Tangible or intangible, fragile or permanent, the trace is present as the evidence of an event. In the creative transit, the traces we leave are instants trapped within space and time” VHI
“Fragility is a concept to which we shouldn’t be afraid of. It’s there. We’re fragile. Fragility is a part of life. There’s nothing more fragile than man itself”. VHI
"The intervened or altered books are based on the idea of appropriation through the transgression of an edited publication (which attracts us due to its format, the quality and weight of the paper), and the possibilities of printed images, to give way, thanks to experimentation, generally manual, to a new book with a visual dimension and different and unique content. They are a different medium than travel notebooks" VHI
"Since I undertook the encounter with nature in capital letters, with the Amazon jungle, the habit of carrying and always using an artist's notebook has increased in me. Not only as a written record of the experience, a travel log, but as a portable extension of my studio- On the pages of my nomadic workshop, limited to a few tools, during the voyage or in moments of rest, I draw lines, let stains flow, superimpose original and successive moments with which I make up my notebooks of the immensity" VHI
"Although during my journeys I make photographic and video records, I feel that only through the footprint that the hand leaves on the pages of the notebook there’s a knowledge that goes beyond the visual experience of the technological image as testimony. In the notebook, all significant perception is soaked, in different intensities, by the unknown, by that dark part of the unconscious contained within the psyche that is transferred during the execution of the stroke" VHI
Víctor Hugo Irazábal. Artist
Humberto Valdivieso. Curator
Zulema González. Production
Mabel Calderín. Cultural Centre Director
María Eugenia Naranjo. Assistant Curator
Noreida González. Assistant Curator
Agustín Villasana. Print and setup
Magno Güeter. Setup
Raquel Cartaya. Photography
Waleska Belisario. Design
Javier Álamo. Design
Bárbara Magallanes. Translation
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