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5/10/2005

Highlights. Prudencio Irazabal

Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz

Nineteen paintings in which this Basque artist, resident in New York, delves further into the nature of colour and light

The Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, ARTIUM of Alava, presents the exhibition “Highlights”, by Prudencio Irazabal (Lower East Gallery, from October 6 to January 15), a broad selection of recent paintings by an artist who has lived and worked in New York for the last 20 years. During this time he has focused his attention on the subject of colour and its perception by the spectator. Irazabal has selected 19 paintings of different format created especially for this exhibition. Together with the meticulous and delicate application of colour typical of his work, a major feature of these paintings are the “highlights” or reflections referred to in the title of this exhibition. “Highlights” represents an exceptional opportunity to explore the most recent work of this Basque painter who rarely exhibits his oeuvre in Spain. The exhibition has been produced by ARTIUM of Alava and the Caja Burgos Art Centre. To accompany the exhibition, and in addition to the exhibition catalogue, a work by Aristotle entitled “Peri kromaton” or “De coloribus” (“About colours”), will be published for the first time in Spanish and Basque. This is one of the first treatises on the theory of colour in history. “Highlights. Prudencio Irazabal” is sponsored by Gasnalsa and the Ministry of Culture.
Prudencio Irazabal (Puentelarrá, Alava, 1954) exhibits his works on a regular basis in the United States and in Europe, and his work can be found in leading museums and collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Since the eighties, Prudencio Irazabal has focused his attention on paint, colour and light, and on the examination of their respective components. His works are characterised for their subtle use of colour gradations, applied in numerous and imperceptible layers to create hazy, formless splashes of colour, with profound, intense and spiritual results. Due to their extreme transparency and radiance, his works have been defined on occasions as a challenge for the human eye.
The exhibition, “Highlights” contains 19 works created since the beginning of 2005 and is the first show in which the author presents a group of works conceived and executed entirely for exhibition in a museum. In these works, Irazabal has altered the course of the work he has developed over the years and has introduced a new element, a highlight or reflection, a basic technique traditionally used by painters to represent volume. While in classical figurative painting, highlights were used to occupy an area left for them on the canvas, in the recent works of this basque artist they have an eerie effect and a magnified presence which apparently violates the integrity and balance of the painting.
Irazabal's intention is to force the spectator to modify his perception of the colours in his paintings, obliging him to look at them through a layer of pure titanium white pigment which both fogs and highlights the colours nearest the canvas. With these highlights, the artist makes the spectator take fisical distance and have a wider point of view (such as a “xooming out”, in photographic terms). So Irazabal forces a view of the cromatic space of his paintings different than that on his previous works.
Natural light
The twenty works presented by Prudencio Irazabal at ARTIUM were produced in New York and Puentelarrá, where the painter was born and where he spent last summer. The exhibition contains works of different formats, ranging from canvases measuring over 2 metres to small paintings of 60 centimetres in length, all of them done with acrylic paint on cloth.
The exhibition occupies the Lower East Gallery of ARTIUM. On this occasion, the doors that provide access to the exterior of the Museum are open and covered with translucent glass. The large openings, one of them measuring 7 metres in height, flood large portions of the Gallery with natural light during daylight hours. Prudencio Irazabal has modified the normal architecture of the Gallery (by opening doors and allowing daylight to enter) in order to offer the spectator a key point of orientation by visual contact with the outside, and also to allow the play of diffused natural light on his paintings.
As is customary in all the exhibitions held at ARTIUM, the show includes a didactic area with ample documentation about the artist. In this case, there are a number of different publications dealing with the subject of colour, ranging from “Colour and culture”, by John Gage (on the symbology of colour throughout history, published in Spain by Siruela) to “The heritage of Apelles”, by Ernst Gombrich (on the use of light and colour in the Renaissance), and include “Industrias y andanzas de Alfanhuí”, by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, a novel which contains repeated references to colour and light such as: “Bebió una yegua preñada y se volvió toda blanca y transparente, porque la sangre y los colores se le iban al feto, que se veía vivísimo en su vientre, como dentro de un fanal/A pregnant mare drank and turned completely white and transparent, because her blood and colour went to the foetus which could be seen in her abdomen, as if inside a beacon”.

The exhibition will include the publication of a catalogue with texts by Bill Arning, curator of the MIT List Visual Arts Centre with an introduction by Javier González de Durana and Rufo Criado, directors of ARTIUM and CAB respectively. Moreover, within the series of publications “ARTIUM Aesthetic Notes”, and on the occasion of the Irazabal exhibition, ARTIUM will publish “Perikromaton” (“About colour”) a work by Aristotle. This is one of the first texts about the theory of colour ever written and has been translated for the first time into Spanish and Basque. ARTIUM has also programmed for November 17 a talk on the use of colour in contemporary art by the artist and university lecturer Javier Chavarría.

(Prudencio Irazabal) is masterful visual seducer, so the individual paintings are always luscious enough to capture and hold the viewer by the eye. Visual pleasure is a highly subjective experience so it would be foolhardy to assert that any artist’s work could universally bring pleasure to all those with functioning vision. Still, Irazabal’s works are as near as I can imagine to a universally alluring experience. Bill Arning

Production: ARTIUM of Alava (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Caja Burgos Art Centre (Burgos)

Exhibition catalogue with texts by Bill Arning, Javier González de Durana and Rufo Criado
Publication of “De coloribus”, by Aristotle in the collection “ARTIUM notes on aesthetics”. First publication in Basque and Spanish
Sponsored by Gasnalsa S.A. and the Ministry of Culture

Lower East Gallery
ARTIUM 24, Francia Street - Vitoria-Gasteiz

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