4/5/2009
Jose' Ramon Amondarain
Estiarte, Madrid
Untitle Film Still. The exhibition presents the complete collection of paintings and photographs by the artist created from an analysis of the series untitle film still by Cindy Sherman. Amondarain is one of the Spanish artists who has contributed to the creation of a painting updated through an analysis of the languages of image and its implications in the formation of visual references in contemporary art.
José Ramón Amondarain (San Sebastián, 1964) is one of the Spanish artists who has
contributed most in the last ten years to the creation of a painting updated through an analysis
of the languages of image and its implications in the formation of visual references in
contemporary art.
The exhibition presents the second part of Amondarain’s work on Untitle Film Stills by Cindy
Sherman, with 16 pieces, completing the first part of 12 works presented in 2006 by Estiarte in
the ARCO 07 fair. The series of photographs Untitle Film Stills by Cindy Sherman, produced in
black and white between 1977 and 1980, is considered to be one of the most original and
important achievements in the contemporary art of recent decades. Ingenious and provocative,
this repertoire of feminine roles inspired by the cinema continues to take the pulse of our culture
through the hand of José Ramón Amondarain.
The entire series is going to be brought together in the book that we are publishing for the
occasion. This book combines all the paintings and photographs which José Ramón
Amondarain has been copying, inventing and recreating the colour and format of 28 of the 70
original images of Cindy Sherman. His meticulous process of tempera copying in small format,
then photographing and enlarging it, as a way of returning the image to the photographic
medium, includes a decision to defocus in the final image. The defocusing of Amondarain wipes
out the traces of his painting in order to generate a disturbing sensation of movement and
vertigo, a displacement of our perception of the images of the famous series by Sherman. José
Ramón Amondarain has catalogued his Film Stills just as the Museum of Modern Art
catalogued Cindy Sherman’s originals when it bought the series in 1995.
The design and the organisation of the book have again been interpreted by Amondarain,
contributing colour, adapting its texts, respecting the decisions and ideas of the original design
but intervening in it, as a means of reconstruction of the series and as a further piece of its
work.
As with Cindy Sherman’s Untitle Film Stills, now the interpretations and reconstructions of José
Ramón Amondarain would like to continue the critical debate on the manner in which we share
our personal identities, questioning the role played by the communications media in our lives
and vindicating the processes of appropiation, reconsideration and re-signification of the great
icons of contemporary art.
Cindy Sherman’s essay in the original text has been replaced with a study by Fernando Castro
Flórez, who states:
"José Ramón Amondarain is a lucid heir of metalinguistic tactics and conscience of the
density of the codes which, for example, are manifested in what, with no further nuances,
we call appropriationism, except that in place of the admiring and emphatic citationism of
the painting of the Eighties, the new pictorialism is organised around the parody of the
figurative models of painting. This painter, extremely lucid and technically highly gifted,
unfolds what we could call a strategy of cultural cannibalism. There is an attitude of
infiltration and sabotage in the iconic flow but also a kind of combat against cultural
repression and, of course, against the conventions that demarcate the practice of
painting, which, in his case, lead him as far as a critical subversion of formalism (...)
"Amondaraín is a perfect example of a conceptual painter who does not resort to the
tautological in the dogmatic manner of Kosuth but instead to parody and to humour.
Parody implies a certain capacity to identify and approach oneself, in the end it implies
an intimacy with the position which the very act of reappropriation alters, which means
entering to a relation of desire and ambivalence. But we must also remember that the
critical role of parody is to separate forms, to empty them and demonstrate their
emptiness, adapting them in any way".
The work of José Ramón Amondarain is represented in the collections of the Reina Sofía
National Museum of Art, Madrid; Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, Amsterdam; Banco
Guipuzcoano Collection, Donostia-San Sebastián; Banco de España Collection, Madrid; Caja
Madrid Collection; Collection of Madrid City Council; La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona; Caja
Burgos Collection; Marcelino Botín Foundation, Santander; Artium. Basque Centre-Museum of
Contemporary Art, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Coca-Cola España Foundation; Chirivella-Soriano
Foundation; C.A.M. Collection, Alicante, among others.
Image: Untitle Film Still, pintura sobre papel 2009
Opening 5 May at 8:30 p.m.
Estiarte
Calle Almagro, 44, bajo 28010 Madrid