Monegros at Km7 Espai d'Art

The Undiscovered Monegros

This dialogue between Pau Guerrero’s photography and the paintings and drawings of Guerrero Medina is the response to an artistic restlessness provoked by the allure of a fascinating landscape. Their work exudes from the boundaries between seeing and observing to create and uncover what has been latent for thousands of years, waiting to be brought to life by the image’s poesy. Who has never felt the attraction of a landscape vanishing into infinity, from the margins of a roadway, a landscape that is left progressively behind during a journey? It is for more than thirty years that Guerrero Medina has had it in mind to explore those routes he used to see losing themselves in the horizon each time he drove through the Monegros on the way to Madrid. Upon repeating the journey, he would run into the same seduction, to which he finally started to respond three years ago. This first incursion into the Monegro’s landscape was an atavistic encounter with nature and the discovery of a universe that broke all clichés. Upon entering deep into it, what should have been a flat landscape transformed into hills, ravines, mounds and precipices… a tectonic landscape sculpted by folds and faults where the artist found the plasticity he intuitively knew existed. In the structure of his compositions on canvas, the abstraction of the foreground is like a journey of initiation to measure the strength and volumetric of the mountains that define the true landscape of this place. In the middle ground of the painting, the treatment he gives to the image awards it with an almost sculptoric presence, highlighting all its telluric strength blended with the magic of colour. He is captivated by the changes of light, foreseeing the evenings when the golden light transforms into blue and the blue embraces all the premonitory cold of the night. The paintings Guerrero Medina dedicates to the Monegros are a synthesis between the matter’s force and its spiritual luminosity. It is about having captured and projected the essence that beats in the soul of the geology, explaining it from the domain of aesthetics. Serenity and experience go hand in hand with reserved silence when, upon exploring the world we manage to push back the abyss, exactly in the same measure which the paint brush knows how to blend the finite with immensity. The fascination around a traditionally black landscape that allowed its thousand colours to be discovered through the gaze of Guerrero Medina, implies that this first incursion needs a second part: that he will do together with Pau Guerrero. Cosmic harmony exists. In this exchange it has been invited into the scenario by water. This element, absent in any reference to this landscape, especially in the Desert, becomes, thanks to weather’s vagaries, the protagonist transforming perceptions, smells, light, composition… Somehow it’s like water wanted to be present again between both artists. Pau discovers the Monegros soaked in water, in a metamorphosis that reveals the fleeting nature of a landscape which has lost its firmness, becoming frail. A landscape in which, with every step, the blocks of earth dissolve and in which a poetic contrast emerges from what is left of its solid appearance. Surrounded by water and mist, the lines of the landscape fade and everything takes on an oriental air. Pau’s photography captures the magical and enigmatic poetry of this undiscovered landscape, a landscape which accelerates changes ordinarily unperceived with the passing of time. The presence of the rain, in his hands, serves to strengthen the depth in shades of tones and light. The composition marks a sharp contrast between the proximity of the earth, furrows and depths which vanish when touched, and the profundity given to the picture through it’s atmospheric layers. All this together with an absence of shadows which allows the colours to bloom in all their splendour. Pau captures the magical instant his gaze projects onto the landscape and which subsequently appears drawn in his photography, whether it be via the pattern of the rain, the twinkle of the leaves, the mirror which separates the furrows from the earth, the hills which break the horizon’s flatness or the junipers emerging from the ground. The technical skills used by Pau Guerrero to decipher the landscape’s calligraphy are purely remarkable. He writes his visions on Kozo paper, a Japanese paper with the transparency and precise thread necessary to qualify as the perfect medium to convey Pau’s poetic interpretation of the landscape, fragile and firm in it’s ever changing existence. At times it seems both artists extract a radiography of the landscape. In the Chinese ink drawings of Guerrero Medina the landscape is represented in it’s essence, even reaching a state of abstraction. The parallelism of certain drawings and photographies does not only exist because both have shared a similar path and known how to dialogue with a similar sensitivity. The delicacy and boldness give structure to two complimentary discourses on an ideal moment that has allowed them to leave evidence of the impossible. The veils of the moistures blur reality and invite you to be seduced by the transparent. The trace of rain is what binds together all the atmospheric layers and the whites of the lime which evoke the illusion of snow.

Pilar Giró, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, May 2017