JOSE RAMÓN AMONDARAIN
PAINTING
Donostia, 1964. Degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad del País Vasco. He works in Arteleku, Donostia – San Sebastián. He is currently undergoing a residency in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.
He has had individual and group exhibitions since 1988. Among his latest solo exhibitions, we could highlight: Espazioaren Irribarrea (The Abundant Laughter of the Space), Gabriel Rolt Gallery, Amsterdam; Amar gana (To love wins), Patio Herreriano Museum, Valladolid; Tiempo y Urgencia (Time and Urgency), Artium, Basque Museum-Center of Contemporary Art, Vitoria-Gasteiz. And from his group exhibitions: On painting, CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; El Ángel exterminador (Angel of destruction), A Room for a Spanish Contemporary Art, Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; Camuflajes (Camouflage), La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Incógnitas. Cartografías del arte contemporáneo en Euskadi (Unknowns. Mapping contemporary Basque Art), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Process and experience
The experience of art is like a complex system of processes, separated from the notion of the project, furthering itself from that strategic timing required to reach a specific goal. In that sense, my work comes from a necessity of a process and a wish in the process. Interestingly, throughout my time in Rome, different things kept cropping up, of which the work hardly bears witness and have little to do with the original project but configures that magma of archaic moments in which the wish to create something will take shape at some point.
Without a specific purpose, I took pictures of paintings, sculptures, objects, hidden places, or small details, as an invitation for what I didn’t yet know that I knew, to appear, turning the pictures into a radar. The images were mixed, shaken, reproduced, copied or were intriguing.
Working from a quote as a base, we show who we measure ourselves up against, who we count on, and how we think. Every reference uncovers a responsibility and a commitment to that base that resituates it somewhere within the past, future and present
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Pentimenti (what is possible)
Paul Virilio begins –the vision machine- by reminding us of what Marmontel said: The arts require witnesses.
Since the time when reasoning was insisted upon, modern pictorial research through X-rays and reflectography have introduced modern methods of visual inspection.
The pentimenti, or regrets, reveal the changes that an author might have made on different layers, hiding below the surface of the work. X-rays going through a body show us its secrets, those that are beyond understanding, and paradoxically offer, as evidence, some burnt images with limited accuracy, seemingly close to a bad photocopy. As if the work was resisting and insisting that there was nothing visible and that it wasn’t hiding what was invisible. The anagrammatic operations also affect these processes and however unsuspected it may be, the results are somewhat belonging, a kind of roller coaster between the surface and the furthest depth.
My work in Rome is to reveal the temporary interior murmurs that simulate uncovering what the surface is hiding, using paint as material to represent, as well as to present without any type of support.
The experience of art is like a complex system of processes, separated from the notion of the project, furthering itself from that strategic timing required to reach a specific goal. In that sense, my work comes from a necessity of a process and a wish in the process. Interestingly, throughout my time in Rome, different things kept cropping up, of which the work hardly bears witness and have little to do with the original project but configures that magma of archaic moments in which the wish to create something will take shape at some point.
Without a specific purpose, I took pictures of paintings, sculptures, objects, hidden places, or small details, as an invitation for what I didn’t yet know that I knew, to appear, turning the pictures into a radar. The images were mixed, shaken, reproduced, copied or were intriguing.
Working from a quote as a base, we show who we measure ourselves up against, who we count on, and how we think. Every reference uncovers a responsibility and a commitment to that base that resituates it somewhere within the past, future and present.