PAINTING IS A MENTAL THING.

An ideal dialogue between the work of Giorgio Morandi and that of Alain Urrutia finds assonances and frictions between one of the great masters of the Twentieth Century and a young Spanish painter. Their visual researches, albeit so different, aim to transfigure the images and objects, interweaving emotion and method, matter and lightness, reality and imagination, because, as Morandi once commented ‘there is nothing more surreal than reality’. 

Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890-1964) establishes a timeless interrogation with still life subjects he represents in his works: bottles, jars, jugs and tins. He investigates the physical reality of common objects in a way that opens to the metaphysical realm of elusive presences and contemplative enigmas. His works deal with suspended visions that if on the one hand suggest minimal fragments of reality, on the other they become a vessel for the viewer’s own imagination, allowing, also through repetition, a concentration that is both dogged and revelatory.

With a similar intention, Alain Urrutia (Bilbao, 1981) inserts each painting into a large, constantly growing mental map. As he pursues new ideas and territories, he approaches and moves away from what he is relentlessly searching for: what remains beneath the stillness of the images. Sudden emotions, reflected actions, common places and primary elements, it all creates intimacy as well as disorientation in his work.

What emerges by this confrontation and imaginary dialogue is the attitude towards of a conceptual idea of painting. It is a sort rarefied mental painting that transcends occasion and iconography, inhabited by a spirit of observation and experimentation, open to the world and to life. For Giorgio Morandi and Alain Urrutia, painted images participate with their entire system of space-time connections to the creation of a superior order, which claims autonomy and self-sufficiency, even if strongly material and not exclusively mystical.