Voluntad de objeto. Rubén Guerrero
Curated by Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
April 7–September 11, 2022
CAAC. Sevilla, Spain
Photographs courtesy of CAAC. Sevilla, Spain
Press release
This exhibition surveys the last decade of Rubén Guerrero’s (Seville, 1976) production by means of a series of paintings that dialogue and even argue amongst themselves, arranged in groups suited to the spatial distribution of the South Cloister in the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. In addition to these pictorial works, in the long corridor that unites the entire space the artist has agreed to show (for the first time ever) a selection of the models he makes prior to or while creating his pictures. But this agreement has a catch: some are reconstructed, and all but one have been integrated in a table-like display that allows them to be viewed from above and below. In this respect, Ángel Calvo Ulloa has pointed out that these pieces “do not actually serve as models; they are not conceived as an image for transferring to a canvas, but rather seem to follow a logic that posits alterations in perception.”
However, and despite the fact that this novelty threatens to detract from the self-referential nature of his painting and the importance of the process of creating the pictorial image, spectators should not let it divert their attention from his pictures and the relationships established between them in the different galleries, for, as Joaquín Jesús Sánchez wrote, his work “produces a cascade of mirages: the abstract extracted from the concrete, the industrial yet simultaneously domestic, the random that is also premeditated. This continuous escapism in his work facilitates a cascade as fragmented as it is rich in interpretations.”
In addition to a room devoted to his drawings or works on paper, which are almost always more direct and immediate, at the end of the itinerary Rubén Guerrero presents a large new picture containing allusions to Hugo Ball and the relational, perhaps because, as Juan Canela notes, it is necessary to shift “the limelight from the representational to the performative, and stop being affected by its presence. To be able to comprehend its pictorial materiality from the place of action, of dialogue, of conversation with bodies.” Therefore, to review the last ten years of Rubén Guerrero’s work s to understand his idea of painting as an objectual will.
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