ART CITIES: Berlin-Luis Gordillo
One of the foremost artists working in Spain, the artist Luis Gordillo’s accomplished career spans over six decades. His distinct approach to the image is propelled by a metabolic impulse that appropriates and reconfigures a vast array of visual input, ranging from photography and comics to more traditional painterly techniques.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: carlier|gebauer Gallery Archive
Luis Gordillo’s abiding interest in psychoanalysis has shaped a complex and layered style of painting that builds worlds within worlds, encompassing multifarious and at times conflicting perspectives. “While I’m painting,” Gordillo explains, “I have a feeling of perforating, of making holes. I’m asking myself what’s at the bottom of this.”¹ This layered approach to constructing an image, which curator Dieter Schwarz has described as a kind of mise en abyme, testifies to the depth and expansiveness of Gordillo’s vision. His solo exhibition “CORAZONADAS” includes new large scale painting and mixed media works on paper. Typical of the artist’s playful approach, which toys with replication and double-meanings, the term means both “of the heart” and to “have a hunch”—to /make an assumption based on intuition. A commonality linking the works across diverse media is Gordillo’s collage-like approach, which derives less from how he brings together different types of materials than his meticulous, complex constructions of pictorial space. With its layers of bold, interlocking lines, a painting on paper, “Cabeza invertida “(2019) exudes a centripetal force, pulling the eye toward the center of the composition. A related body of smaller mixed media works on paper, titled “Conexión Transversal”, impart a similar sense of dynamic energy and power. In “ROBOT: ¡! Electrízame!! “(2021/2022) pockets of organic forms are embedded within rigorous geometric constructions. The friction between hard-edged linear lines, softer scribbles, and undulating forms lends the painting both a sense of restraint and corporeal intensity.
Throughout more than six decades of work, Luis Gordillo has navigated between various artistic currents, whose particular interpretation and perpetual renewal have made him one of the main artistic artists in Spain, both in the avant-garde of the last century and nowadays. His characteristic style is more a result of his own trajectory, of evolutions and ruptures, than of the individual sources from which he has drawn over the years. We see it in the tendency to unfold an image, close to the kaleidoscopic vision, which has its roots in its geometric tendencies. The obsession with photography, which he takes apart and decontextualizes in a practice reminiscent of his initial collages and those elements of Pop-Art that Gordillo metabolized in a step towards his personal style in which the mass culture and the cult of consumerism were rejected. And, above all, that dual tension between the sudden, the organic, the intimate, and other more rational, orderly and social tendencies. His entire career has been a search towards harmony between his informalist beginnings and aesthetic currents tied to constructivism that demanded a colder, premeditated approach. This constant search forces his painting to continue evolving and growing, infusing with vitality his most imposing canvases and his most intimate and experimental drawings; his first steps and his most recent work.
Photo: Luis Gordillom, Courtesy the artist and carlier|gebauer Gallery,
Info: carlier|gebauer Gallery, Markgrafenstraße 67, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 25/6-3/9/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.carliergebauer.com/
