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New space location from April 2012. Alcalá 115, 1º Dcha. 28009, Madrid.
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Galeria Distrito Cu4tro is opening its autumn season, 2003, with an exhibition of the art work of the Basque painter Darío Urzay.
An abstract artist with a conceptual edge, he sets up a dialogue between painting and photography, where it is difficult to be precise as to what is the original and what is the reproduced image. Works which give organic signals which take us to microscopic illusions or cosmic spaces, (macrocosms-microcosms), are resolved through a pictorial process in which the artist uses new techniques.
Darío Urzay uses the computer, photography and painting to produce a range of work which reflects the world in which we live. He uses digital programmes to suggest abstract processes, photography to allude to the illusory nature of reality and painting is the area where he explores aspects of body language. In this exhibition Urzay shows the moving image for the first time as an integral part of his painting.
As part of the artist’s continual struggle to touch the spectator by the experimental nature of his work, this exhibition contains some of his “negative paintings”. In this batch of recent work, containing for example “Insider-negative” and “Reed Floop”, he refers to photographic negatives and to the transformation of the image from “negative” to “positive”. In this case the abstraction is not in the painting itself but in the eye of the viewer.
One changing aspect of this process is the use he makes of the moving image. One of Urzay’s works painted in negative is captured in real time by a digital video camera and uses a way of recording in the negative. When this image is projected everything is turned around and the painting now appears positive. If the viewer enters the camera’s field of vision he appears in the negative as opposed to the painting which is seen in positive. The inversion process becomes automatic in that the abstraction has remained for a moment in the digital field. Urzay has been using 3D digital software to create images for some years. He incorporates the computer as if it were an extension of the artist’s hand so that it becomes an integral part of the artistic process. Three dimensional images generated on the computer can be considered as the work of a virtual painter located somewhere in the hardware! The resulting images are printed on a large scale and once mounted they become the surface on which the hand of the artist will make his pictorial marks.
Another work in this exhibition shows the documentation process in which at different times the remains of the fluid painting have been photographed in order to be animated by the computer. The synthesis which this work alludes to concretely can also be considered as the common denominator of the exhibition in that the large scale works shown in cinema screen format, possess like a baroque painting, the capacity to synthesise the fluidity of movement in a fixed image.
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