Artist: Isidro Blasco
Fechas: September 14th 2023 to November 9th 2023

RETURN TO ITHACA

“Surface variations” (“Variaciones en la superficie”) is a new collection by Isidro Blasco. Fusing architecture and sculpture, it takes viewers on a multi-dimensional journey, starting with volumetric imaginings before making a strange yet epic return to classical sculpture through the conceptual lens of the “-ism”. The suffix “-ism” was applied successively to a series of 20^th century artistic movements, defined by Mario De Micheli in his book “Las vanguardias artísticas del siglo XX” (“The Artistic Avant-Gardes of the 20th Century”). This was a golden age for art, giving birth to more movements and currents than any other period in the history of art under Western study.

In his work, Blasco generally uses diverse materials and hybrid techniques to create three-dimensional structures that defy the traditional boundaries of art. Each piece invites us to immerse ourselves in a universe of our own, where reality intertwines with imagination. If this is the case, and with this kind of structure, it is the form itself that takes precedence over the photographic image, which had hitherto maintained a cardinal importance. The presence of volume has typically been an identifying factor in Isidro Blasco’s work: we see how the image comes towards us, how the sculpture envelops our gaze to create a small trompe l’oeil of reality. But in this series, although volume is undoubtedly a factor, it is not what the collection is about. In the artist’s own words, “it is a return to classical sculpture”. And really, looking at this series of variations on the surface of the sculpture itself, we can understand it as such. The structures are dynamic, conveying movement; they even insinuate foreshortening through the twisting of wood in combination with images. It is, ultimately, a revisitation; a return to the hallmarks of classical Hellenic sculpture, through a contemplative odyssey that reflects the artist’s own inner conflicts, his desire to investigate, to take the spirit of his work further.

At the same time, and introducing the previously mentioned concept of “-isms”, Blasco’s work moves towards cubism in its most cryptic stage. His structures, previously preserved and recognisable – the infinite cities, the chopped-up planes, the raised buildings, the streets, the squares and the people – lose all definition. The colours become predominantly negative. In past conversations about his work, Blasco has referred to the alteration of colours as relating to the subjectivity of the viewer’s own memory. Here, as in a Greek sculpture, it passes into polychromy merely for the sake of ornamentation. The search for aesthetics beyond form. The alteration of reality in favour of expression in a kind of tinting process that comes very close to abstraction through the colour and content of the image. In the same manner, Blasco’s previously ordered and recognisable structures lose all logic. We find ourselves upside down in Isidro’s world, unable to walk through his sculptures as before. Order vanishes to give way to a much more singular phenomenon: discovery. The non-obviousness of the image excites our imagination: on a journey of discovery we bend over, twist our necks, squat down, squint our eyes, imitating the torsion and movement of the object we are contemplating. Is this series by Isidro Blasco perhaps a sculpture about dreamlike spaces? Maybe it is the realisation of a surrealist sculpture (surrealism).

We have returned to sculpture’s most classical values, but, like Ulysses in Homer’s Odyssey, Blasco brings us a transformed sculpture. It is the journey through all these centuries, trawling through the artist’s own experience, that brings all this change in its wake. The evolution of concepts and ideas is, if we dedicate ourselves to art from the heart, inevitable.

-Álvaro Talarewitz-