Procesos. Oneliners
PACHUCA SOTOMAYOR & ÁLVARO SOTOMAYOR
CURATED BY LAURA JIMÉNEZ IZQUIERDO
Show setting:
Sala de Exposiciones del Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos Vasco Navarro de Bilbao, Bizkaia.
From October 20 through November 30.
In one of those days when a storm of skills, genius and creativity fell on the face of the Earth, the Sotomayor family had to soak from head to toe. On this occasion we are fortunate to be able to see some of the creative remains of that rain: the work of the artists and siblings Pachuca Sotomayor and Alvaro Sotomayor.
It was not a shower of unbalanced talents, rather an enviable and admirable artistic and vital education that took place in the Sotomayor’s home. This education undoubtedly goes hand in hand with the innate talent of these two artists to express that hurricane of ideas, ingenuity and imagination that they have to have in their heads.
Considering the works of both differ formally, they share that touch of delicacy and elegance converging certain elements that each one adds.
Pachuca brings color, texture and the tactile. Alvaro the simplicity of the line, the flat and the elemental. She brings the abstraction. He brings the figuration. Although we see how these two aspects are perfect and almost necessarily combinable. One can get lost in that rhythm of Alvaro's lines just as well as into Pachuca's textures. You can also find in Pachuca’s universes linear figurations interconnected as string theory suggests, just like Alvaro’s "oneliners".
And as it turns out, the two of them dance: Alvaro transforming his "oneliners" into sculptures with his virtual reality three dimensions device almost extracted from science fiction. Pachuca to communicate with her processes. And both of them do it having found that arduous midpoint, that harmonious balance in their travels and in the destiny of their work.
By completely different paths, the two siblings end up talking about emotions, collective human emotions. Alvaro of the interconnection of all of them. Pachuca of that emotional web that connects the inner world of the artist with the observer’s.
Two journeys through that complex universe of emotions in which both Pachuca and Alvaro invite us to participate and lose ourselves in it to find our own message within the delicacy and excess of their work.
PROCESOS.
PACHUCA SOTOMAYOR
It has been two years since destiny or serendipity wanted to get in touch with Pachuca Sotomayor (Bilbao, 1962) and after many enriching and interesting meetings and conversations, we find ourselves again sharing walls. She with her great canvases full of strength and emotions and I accompanying her with my words. The last time her brush strokes and my lyrics danced together was in Soria, my native land. Now we have traveled to Bilbao, land that saw Pachuca’s creative talent born and who receives her again with open arms, eyes and ears to welcome, see and hear everything that the artist has to share.
Pachuca’s Processes have continued evolving in these two years, preserving that synesthetic character of the colors, forms, senses, feelings, the delicacy of her informalism and the esthetic of the fate so rhythmic and musical with which all her pictures dance.
The euphony and the gentle convulsion of her work tell in a whisper that dance she practices with her paintings and that seam of which the artist herself speaks, which leads her to a creative journey woven of emotions where she reconnects with herself and with her world:
"And in that work of weaving slowly, with awareness of being, without
haste, without judgment, admiring, without wanting to be anywhere else,
without wanting to be anything else, excited by what is woven in my hands,
I reconnect with my essential being. With what was always and always will be.
With that place that contains everything, where everything is.
And I remember. And I smile. And I paint. I am home."
Observing Pachuca dancing around her canvases on her studio’s floor, where she waters in a continuous dialogue with rhythm and delicacy the water and the sap that they ask for, it comes to my head the photographs of the American artist Helen Frankenthaler, whom gave a much more delicate use to the famous pollockian dripping technique. In these Pachuca’s Processes we continue to observe how the artist drinks from the source of Spanish informalism, from the stream of Kandinsky's synesthetic painting or from the flow of American abstract expressionism.
This conversation that Pachuca maintains with her Processes is not only a dance but a battle between containment and chaos, between the predictable and the unpredictable; always achieving that balance and harmony of weights, textures and colors. Sands that meet again after being separated by oceans are stained with vermilion, carmine or black ivory. Geometric figures where triangles and arrows predominate, indicating perhaps some way or perhaps just pivoting in different directions to enter by the artist’s hand into the world of the symbolic.
"Every canvas is a journey on its own" said Frankenthaler, and for me the last journeys and canvases suggest a more Mediterranean Pachuca, in the center of the lands. Indigo blues and clear terracottas that seem calm and in a certain way call the calm of waves. A discharge of certain elements and textures by which she vents her paintings of excesses, reaching a point of balance between an impetuous storm and a gentle dew.
Pachuca studies ever more deeply the universe of emotions and their relationship with color, art and the human being. How each of the more than three hundred emotions that we can get to feel and perceive is interrelated in a structure that helps us to understand human behavior. How each of these emotions is also related to a color and an intensity. The artist travels through this universe from one emotion to another by the emotional spectrum, from one tone to another by the chromatic spectrum giving her paintings that knowledge, understanding the intrinsic greatness in each small creation, finding the center in chaos.
It is her way of expressing herself with the world in a reciprocal way inviting the observer to experience a synesthetic journey, to enter into her cosmos where she creates a concert of powerful warps, delicate lines tangled like ivy and an innocuous chromatic storm.
Come prepared to listen and feel the spontaneity, lyricism and vitality of Pachuca’s abstract canvases. Join the journey through her universe of emotions or if you prefer create your own itinerary. We hope you enjoy the journey.
ONELINERS.
ÁLVARO SOTOMAYOR
The artistic work of Álvaro Sotomayor (Málaga, 1970) is multidisciplinary, while extensive, diverse and subtle. Nothing less could be expected from someone with more than twenty years of experience as a creative director. Alvaro lives in a state of constant creation in which his period of gestation of ideas and inventiveness seems to go faster than the light. He is able to adapt his entire imaginative galaxy to any medium and maintain that witty and elegant tone that characterizes him.
On this occasion, Alvaro Sotomayor has brought to us from Amsterdam his "oneliners" framed in what the artist defines as a "circulist" style. Some drawings are, as their names indicate, composed only by a line of ink. A line that without rising from the paper expresses all the intention on a single stroke. A first line, outline, final, last and unique; everything at once. Álvaro, as an admirer of his fellow Pablo Picasso, drinks from cubism and institutes circulism as an evolution based on flow and interconnection. In the artist's words:
"Where you end I start and vice versa. We are all united."
But Alvaro, as a good creative director, knows that the drawings are nothing more than as Matisse would say "the direct and purest translation of emotions."
There is in particular a part of Alvaro´s work, his great series Saudade, which although formally reminiscent of some Ss between the Picassian and the Matissian, conceptually conveys to that Giacometti heartbreaking expressionism. In this singular series of the Collective, composed by a mural 11 meters long by 4 meters high, Alvaro represents the humanity and all its emotions. A work where everything is connected by the line, a human mass lost in a boat in the middle of the ocean, like The Raft of the Medusa of Géricault. Some prayers, hugs, condolences or simple conversations that show the variations in human emotions united and connected. That portuguese Saudade so difficult to define that José Luis Varela determined as "the search for an unknown object that feels necessary" and that perhaps could define this deep work of inquiry of the artist into the great soul that we all share.
Alvaro explains how the history of the medium is as important as the form it takes. The importance is not the destination, it’s the journey. All these drawings and sketches become a journey of search, of inquiry into the essential and deep knowledge of the human being where the observer is invited as a final destination to recognize in the work his own emotions.
Anyway, we must not forget that many of Alvaro’s drawings, considered work in themselves are also designed to be transformed into sculptures. A selection of these lines of ink on paper have been tridimensionalized into elegant bronze "oneliner" sculptures, of great boldness and ease, resembling in a way Alexander Calder's stable wire sculptures.
May this text also be an "oneliner" that interconnects the meaning and flows so delicately through the eyes, ears and hearts of those who receive it. That where one begins, the other ends, as a search turn into ourselves, as a journey through a single stroke of ink. That like Alvaro Sotomayor´s drawings remind us of those shared human emotions: love, anger, joy, happiness, sadness, fear, saudade... Let them be at least half as resounding, delicate and elegant as Álvaro Sotomayor's work and do it in a single stroke, with a line of words.
Laura Jimenez Izquierdo
July 2017
