Luis Gordillo displays his latest stunning paintings

The new exhibition by Luis Gordillo (Seville, 1934) draws attention, with impressive intensity, to the quality of his artistic work. At 88, he says this could be his last show at Marlborough Gallery, where he exhibits every four years. It may be difficult to put together pieces of the size and complexity we see now, but your creative force and potency remain fully open.

All spaces in the gallery are occupied, with an orderly exhibition and maintaining good distances to allow viewing of the assembled pieces without interference. We are faced with 23 works, all of them with very suggestive titles, of poetic-conceptual escape: large format paintings (among them a diptych, a triptych and a polyptych), medium format drawings and, something very special, a huge panel, measuring one and a half meters by five meters.

The title of this work gordillensis autobiography (2020), takes us, with a linguistic game of expression in the Latin derivation of the term “gordillensis”, to an impressive synthesis of the genealogy of Gordillo’s work. A long series of images were fixed on the panel, from pictorial forms in open mixtures, to toys, reproductions of classical painters (among them Velázquez, Goya or Rembrandt), and various photographs by Gordillo himself, always intervened with a vein of ironic humor.

Here it is appropriate to highlight a recurring aspect not only in this work but also in many others present in the exhibition. And it is that we continually see images of Luis Gordillo's face inserted into the pieces, always in dynamic attitudes, which leads us to realize that we are really facing an autobiographical reconstruction of the framework that deeply unites his artistic work with the course of his life. , your passions and desires.

This is an issue to which Gordillo explicitly referred when stating that what he calls his “duplexes”, his unfolding of works in two parts, vertically and horizontally, they are expressions of your unfolded self.

This confluent itinerary of art and life meant that Gordillo's creative work was in no way situated in stillness or repetition: the records of his works always lead us to discovery, innovation. Of course, painting is at the root of everything, but conceived in the current situation so determined by engaging techniques of visual representation, as a dialogue with them in order to transgress the merely pragmatic-material use of media images.

From drawing and pictorial expression, Gordillo has dialogued with photographs and digital images. And from these open conversations subversive works emerged, which mix the questioning and the enigmatic of representations to build visual mirrors that, seeing ourselves reflected in them, lead us to question Who are we in this world of fluid and immersive images in which we live today?. All these issues that intensely mark the high artistic level of the pieces brought together in this great exhibition.

Luis Gordillo's works deeply dialogue with our eyes until they awaken in them the vision of the open questions they represent

Gordillo explicitly points out his controlled use of digital media, in which he distinguishes their positive aspects and their risks. Good art cannot be identified with the immediacy of uses and practices that are so common in the image of the world today. His works are characterized by intense care in preparation, study time and development. The end result is something as open as life itself., but precisely for this reason its meaning is there. What vibrates in them at each step is the agitated game of thought that moves the body.

[Luis Gordillo: “I don’t know if I’m an analog or digital artist”]

In short, Luis Gordillo's works deeply dialogue with our eyes until they awaken in them a vision of the open questions they represent. The stunning pieces brought together in this exhibition range, in a continuous mix, from figurative formalism to expressive informalism: in all cases poetic-visual questions that open our eyes.

And here, in the “Gordillan” miscegenations of the image, we are faced with an intensely significant horizon. In my opinion, one of the most important ways of enriching human cultures is precisely mixing, miscegenation, recognition of the importance of diversity in the experiences of our lives.

The “gordilla” mixtures of the image are mixtures of different types and configurations of image, always based on the question and control over what is deep and relevant, never from mere immediacy. From mixtures to the depth of the image, to what lies beyond the immediate.

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