SPATIUM TEMPORIS - LIMITS - VOID - ECLIPSES
THAT IMPLACABLE EXIGENCY
It is art itself who must teach us to free ourselves from the rules of art.
Molière
It is necessary to see, not what it is like, but what it could and should be.
Quatremère De Quincy
The upsetting notion of setting out, of all beginnings, unavoidably subjugated by that true instant, before time, yet to be memorized, in which this begins, gives way to an occurrence that in turn generates possible, varied events, that relate those thresholds of position, adimensional, without space or time, but with the energy intact from the expansive origin (An eon? A millisecond?) that even so must paradoxically involve structure, and a past. Here is the development around the idea of a slow discontinuity, from the exhibition of paintings I created in 1986 in which Fundació Caixa de Pensions de Valencia, whose catalogue with a prologue by Daniel Giralt-Miracle I must mention as an antecedent that will explain the step that the exhibition signifies.
To sum up, the author of the presentation said: “Covering ground, Yturralde, at this moment, and despite the predominance of constructive or geometric grammar, is nearer poetry than a Rothko as far as the degrees of fantasy and formal sobriety are concerned, than the same Yturralde of ten years ago. They are pictures constructed of large zones of colour, penetrated by simple elements that activate the surfaces and are projected expansively outwards, whereas in his previous stage everything was surrounded by emblematic shapes full of energy but closed in upon themselves.” It is worth adding now that the large, more or less neutral zones of colour, tempered by the directional or fluctuating order of the simple structural elements they are composed of, are radicalised a little more. They are also emptied to establish other limits, other tensions in what is impossible that is still left in the field of nothingness, making the delicate presence of absence evident, the metaphor of the lowest state of energy towards the concept that appears to contain all possibilities, perhaps from a perfect irregularity, randomness and the unforeseeable to a kind of more mysterious order: chaos. Perhaps the kind of archetype I seek. How can one trace the void, nothingness, the infinite, the beginning and end as a generatrix cause? Perhaps Mandelbrot’s processes and fractal sets (now classical), no longer for the visual results of their images but for the philosophy that comes from their complex periodicity, for the insecurity in the diligence applied to the models, and above all because they incessantly explore the extreme zones of tension, in the limit of limits. And the affirmation (for now) that in these sets, following extraordinarily precise patterns, there is no place for the laws of randomness, determinism or predictability. As if randomness were an illusion.
Thus, there are some elusive, distant aspects left, of hidden expressions, not in the limits but in those places that perception misses, the not-centre, the not-vertex, the not-main directions like the zenith, the horizon or the nadir, specific diagonals and the right angle.
Perhaps the random models that come out of chaos lead us to concepts that are more in keeping with art and with life that, as Erwin Schirödinger said, possesses the “amazing gift of concentrating a flow of order in itself, and frees itself of the chance to fall into cosmic chaos”, or to a state of entropy of maximum stability.
I believe that these visual memoirs, the pictures present here, are a logical part of those fluctuating forms that, from a paradoxical solidity, in some way representative, that the “impossible figures” were that came out of the spatial networks of a secret multidimensional desire, and that they were not “pictures” until the current parenthesis, which implies taking up the plan again and a more poetic yet if possible highly precise attitude.
I have tried to recuperate, by modification and naturally from a different point of view, the compositional-musical of Leo Battista Alberti, the golden sequences of Paolo Uccello, the strange geometrical negation through geometry of a Peter Halley, or the spatial tensions that are generated by the works of Gerhard Merz.
But my intention of atemporality necessarily leads me to moderate the classical measures, to make minimal shifts at times, subtle but evident ones, stating the lack of coincidence, building divergences until the parallels will never meet. I destabilize the points of maximum tension that articulate the networks and obvious rhythms of the picture, lightly dodging them, slowly. The squares, which in general are not squares as such, will therefore never be able to overlap. They are an appearance, a desire, a form of synapses or gluons that intertwine imperceptible pulsations, shapes and colours in an apparent unstable silence.
I should like to hear the light movement of the geometry of chaos.
JOSÉ MARÍA YTURRALDE