As part of ARTNOU 2017, Bombon projects presents an exhibition by two artists who, even though they belong to very different generations, can be considered as emergent; a category in which young, and not so young, artists are familiar with. Josep Maria de Sucre (1886-1969), painter, writer, artistic promoter and criminal lawyer, enjoyed in certain moments of his career recognition as an artist. However the current repudiation of his work resituates him in the emergence. Together with Aldo Urbano (1991), emergent artist, category that he can’t escape, will enter an electrifying intergenerational dialogue.

Ouroboros: It is difficult to differentiate concepts from images

Text by Caterina Almirall

Aldo Urbano says that by repeating the gesture, devoting a lot of effort to it, it can happen that we confuse the top with the bottom, and in this state of fluctuating transition we no longer know if we are going up or down. The young are old and the old reborn. The relationship between Aldo Urbano and J.M. de Sucre is based on this confusion, a confusion between up and down, between going up and down. A confusion of colors, shapes, physical and mental states. A confusion between being inside and being outside. In this confusion, time becomes tangled and the past becomes present, and the present past, and the future does not exist. What was before is also now, so that things are next to each other giving shape, deforming. For pure distortion specular pleasure. Yellow, placed here in the middle of this blue, is gold, and painting is alchemy. We have to look carefully for a while until we no longer know where our eyes are and where the colors are. The eyes, in this equation of confusion, try to delimit the inside from the outside, like a door, but what they actually do is project everything that is inside outward, and at the same time, everything that is outside toward inside, so that the two things get mixed up and in the end we no longer recognize what we know from what we have invented. Was this violet already here a while ago or did they just put it in? Alchemy is the transmutation of matter, into gold or simply into something that was not before. The ingredients are a palette of colors that works like a horoscope, according to the alignment of the stars, that is, of the shapes that contain them and the surface that supports them.

Aldo Urbano and J. M. de Sucre share the desire that the forms they paint produce something beyond themselves, painting involves affecting the future. De Sucre, for example, painted faces on the walls and doors of his house to scare away thieves who came in to steal what he didn’t have. These paintings on the walls and doors have a very specific function and also house the painter’s hope of having a power over reality. It is difficult to separate the image from the function for which it has been painted.

It is difficult to differentiate concepts from images. The symbology explains how each form contains the other forms, which are included and complement each other making the total of the forms of the universe. The word universe almost always defines the whole. One and all forms at the same time, without a beginning or an end, but in a relationship of constant mutation from one to the other. This is the ouroboros, the snake that bites its tail. Movement is essential. The ability to be in two places at once. To be young and consecrated at the same time. To be an aristocrat and live in poverty. As experts in symbology explain, the circle is the origin, infinity, non-action; it is activated by the triangle, which connects three points and generates a finite space, and when this is mirrored, the square appears. The compulsive movement of the paintings responds to these forms. But this does not mean that the paintings are the universe, but that each particle is the whole universe and vice versa. The paintings are not symbols and do not represent because they are literal, they want to scare thieves.