ESTE CUADRO ME MIRA RARO /THIS PAINTING LOOKS AT ME FUNNY

Painting cannot be trusted. It never has been, but since it lost its central role as a mechanism for representing reality it has become even more treacherous. Through its paradoxical mechanism, it always tries to hide its corporeality – pigment, substance, gesture – to present us with the fiction of an image that lives by itself. It is the alchemy at the heart of a deception that gives it its unhealthy charm. It is what draws artists into its web, animated by the possibility of mastering the forbidden interplay of matter, action and form.

However, there are those who do not fall into the trap. Good painters smell the scorchers from afar and, for this reason, Carlos Pesudo (Castellón, 1992) has a hint of aftertaste and crudeness when he works. Our artist goes round and round the elements that make up the framework of the image. Searching, searching beyond these first glimpses, he makes the essential forms, the fields of colour, the events… appear. He invokes the ghost within the pictorial mechanism. It seems simple, but it is not at all. You have to be brave enough to bring the skeleton out of the wardrobe and have the presence of mind to exclaim before the canvas, always mutant, give me poison, I want to die. In this particular case, banana poison, an imaginary substance distilled from a streak of acid yellow, discovered in the interstice of one of the paintings in “This painting looks at me funny”, his new exhibition at Herrero de Tejada Gallery.

Here we have some alien paintings claiming their right to an autonomous life. There is a painter who tries to bring them into line. And we, the spectators, are trapped, not quite understanding the nature of the game. The painting is stirring before our eyes, as if it were a creature, and illuminates shapes, mists, expressions? Pesudo tries to tame and name all that we see – and do not understand – in this succession of metamorphoses: bird of paradise, eisbär, bridges, organs, hanging, raves on the top of Olympus… From the geometric and elemental, he moves on to the organic, revealing a realm rich in incomplete forms and cryptic, arbitrary natures. Thus, oil and spray paint are superimposed on each other in a wild painting that dissolves in lyricism or sharpens in the unexpectedness of the event.

Cruel paintings that bask in their position of dominance when they corner us in a “not a landscape”. In describing some of these forms, the painter speaks of insects, crustaceans… “[…] when I paint I think of a spider’s web, set up like a hunting mechanism”, he says when talking about this exhibition. Sometimes it is the painter who hunts; at other times, the unknown work of art prepares to devour Frenhofer and his relatives.

This painting looks at me strangely and nothing good ever comes out of the look. The look precedes the bite, it evokes traces of natural terror in the face of the predator. The fact that a painting looks at us is not without a certain jettatura. It is a somewhat perverse investment and, like any perversity, it attracts and unsettles in equal parts. The painting, crouched on its rectangular threshold, prepares to drag us into its world of formless shapes, of intricate forests; of colours and silences, of acid lines and fluorescent charcoal. For Pesudo, it is in this wild, autonomous, strange and threatening character that lies the dark fluid that keeps alive a work in permanent tension and growth.

In this new exhibition, the artist seems to want to share with us the thrill of being torn apart inside paintings that look at us with longing before we become prey to their narrow, eyeless gaze. And, in spite of the sensation of danger and the distrust that is palpable in the atmosphere, we enter the gallery once again, because it is also flattering and morbid for the spectator to know that he is the object of a sacrifice that he doesn’t quite understand. Quite an exhibition proposal. A vertigo.

By David Morán