EL GUATEQUE - Solo Show 2024, Madrid. Yusto Giner Gallery.
When Ernest Hemingway wrote Paris was a Party in 1964, the author intended to remember the best deeds of his youth in the French capital. «[…] In Europe we drank wine as something as healthy and normal as food, and also as a great dispenser of joy and well-being and happiness. Drinking wine was neither a snobbery nor a sign of distinction nor a cult; It was as natural as eating, (…)» The concept of party was extended to the author Enrique Vila-Matas with his autofiction Paris never ends (2000), in which he constantly remembers Hemingway’s book. Vila-Matas in Paris was very poor and very unhappy and, although he constantly pursued the shadow of the American author, which did not bring him the happiness and status he had dreamed of, he did see how life stopped at the festive gatherings that occurred in that city that, in fact, , it never ends.
Pesudo, a plastic artist – who also plays with other formats such as video or installation, in addition to the properly pictorial-abstract medium -, rebelliously expressionist, has a humorous proposal, focused on the bonheur de vivre to which Henri Matisse alluded. In the curatorial text already referred to, this conjunction of tragicomic forces is expressed: «“El Guateque” is an expressionist jungle that, without a physical mask, but with the best of disguises, executes in its unity the roles and alter egos of all the strangers of this great celebration, leaving in their wake a trail of mystery and laughter, like someone passing from group to group in the middle of a party.»
In relation to this, Pesudo states that «this conciliation between the painting and the festive nature of the exhibition occurs first of all in the studio. And not so much for a comical issue, but for the relationship that is generated between the party and the process. The expo talks about a party, a scenario in which you know where you are starting from, but not where you are going or how you are going to end up. (…). It is a journey into the unknown and the unexpected. (…) This metaphor gives rise to a somewhat more ironic materialization, with abstract figures that adopt dance-like attitudes and titles that attempt to de-sublimate the question of painting, which seem to trivialize the scenes in a game of “representation” whose logic does not it is just understood. The work becomes a carnival, (…)» Furthermore, “El Guateque” can be conceived as an installation: the sobriety of the pictorial pieces converse with «the antique lamps painted in colors, with light bulbs that sequentially change color. (…) exaggeratedly tacky objects, festive and ornate elements, the pure expression of the inconsequential, of the “brilli-brilli.”»
“>The subtle is part of the aesthetic vision that Pesudo projects; light and essential in its formality, direct and raw in its meaning. «Subtlety has been a fundamental pillar in the development and evolution of my work. (…)
On many occasions, to finish a painting, I have felt that I had to abandon painting in its purest sense, to give rise to a play of stains, shapes or elements that are nothing more than aesthetic, almost decorative solutions, noise that accompanies . , but at the same time it confuses the truest and most essential question of the work,” the artist tells us.
Artículo de la revista Siroco . 2024
EL GUATEQUE
The best place to have an artistic epiphany is, without a doubt, the atmospheric synesthesia of a good party.
Nothing more intoxicating and suggestive than a few acquaintances and strangers in the same environment, united by the wonderful syndrome of fun.
Intermediate light, music, with or without pairing, this break from normality generates in us a predisposition to pleasure, immediate and collective joy in the same social environment. Ambrosia of the gods for creative spirits.
Carlos Pesudo decides in “El Guateque ” to name as muse, all the energy that surrounds these encounters, being aware that, out of the routine habit, the blur, generates a new approach.
In this group of works we find a kind of plastic pyrotechnics where the apparent organic forms are transmuted at the last second to give life to an abstract, impulsive and fierce narrative. We still dance out of the intoxicating festive oxygen but in the process of the studio, the dance is different. There is no tragedy without joy and no “El Guateque” without darkness.
Sensitive states and recurring thoughts are sweetened in a superstitious ritual, crossing again and again their own spider’s web in search of reaching the superior force of creation.
From the chinesque shadows and not from the shadow that has no light, doubts look for successes. Too many lives in that last stroke, too many minutes before that gesture.
This process full of sensations and acts is marked by an escapist spirit that, faced with the possibility of generating certainty in the forms, plays with ambiguity, starting from the essence but erasing all traces of the obvious.
Like the steps of a dance that we cannot remember, our eye perceives this rhythmic abstraction as familiar. In this false optical illusion we see his world appear, a small inner wild jungle, full of memories and vital fragments that are now frames blurred in strokes.
We find the smile of the moon jumping at whim from frame to frame illuminating each piece with its joke. Insects flap their wings in an eternal “butterfly effect” that circulates throughout the day and night while nature
dances.
“El Guateque” is an expressionist jungle that without a physical mask but with the best of disguises, executes in its unity the roles and alter egos of all the unknown people of this great celebration, leaving in its wake a trail of mystery and laughter like someone passing from group to group in the middle of a party.
Like the diffuse memory of a great night, magnetic and provocative, this is
the plastic of the uncontrolled.
Victoria Rivers