Luis Úrculo, starting from design to conquer space

It may seem like child's play. Draw whimsical gestures in the beach sand that don't have to mean anything other than themselves. Trust your free hand to learn to unlearn, to be able to invent a new language. This is how he relearned how to draw Luis Urculo (Madrid, 1978), who began his creative process starting from drawing on paper to conquer space, leaving aside his training as an architect. connect with the prehistory of gesturewith the unit before representation.

The instinctive movement of his hand, as he calls a kind of “babbling”, creates beautiful landscapes of lines —of strokes or frictions—, in a choreography that runs throughout the exhibition space in his first solo exhibition at the Sabrina Amrani gallery in Madrid. Not only in his drawings, but also in his sculptures there are traces of these gestures, even in the lines that visitors draw when walking on the floor covered with powder plaster, which transforms the gallery into a landscape of white dunes where there is even a lake, a shiny watery surface impregnated with white acrylic pigment from which a kind of sand idol emerges. Úrculo guides us through a nebula of memory in an indefinite time.

This ambiguous atmosphere, encouraged by Bruma FX's sound design, which in turn deconstructs a sound piece from its previous exhibition at the Centro Cultural de España, Mexico, curated by Chus Martínez, features singer Silvana Estrada as she mouths a few notes. Sound sporadically invades the space, interfering with our expository memory.

[Luis Úrculo and his act]

This atmosphere constitutes the aesthetic response to the curatorial proposal of Rodrigo Ortiz de Monasterio question a forgotten character. Curation, instead of being a description of what was done, is written at the time of a fictional narrative, and will be reflected in a publication in which each work will correspond to a memory of this character without memory. Pieces and memories will change in a second exhibition phase, which will take place at the end of February, coinciding with ARCO.

Between the atavistic and the radically contemporaryÚrculo proposes an approach to sculpture articulating raw materials such as readydeclining the poetics of raw materials, practically unprocessed: raw clay or unmolded plaster, also taking the idea of erosion to the extreme.

From them sculptures made from construction sand they seem to have been discovered in a distant site of some extinct civilization, and emanate an archaeological and scientific-fictional approach, like ancient mythology, of gods and kings who have not yet been born, who subvert the mechanisms of history.

On the walls large format drawings made with Oaxacan clay and black clay armed with wires, abstract, centrifugal, almost mural. The exquisite bronze pieces, a material he uses for the first time, were modeled in wax with the heat of his fingers to achieve the language of line gesture, and hung weightless on the wall, halfway between sculpture and drawing.

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