The Age of Anxiety

CAROLINA PUIGDEVALL

The long poem by W. H. Auden on the continuous search for the meaning of existence in a changing world without brakes inspired Bernstein, who captured this feeling in a symphony of the same title. Under the influence of this same symphony, as a kind of soundtrack of contemporary ethos, Alain Urrutia paints the series of works that form this exhibition which as usual, invites to reflect, to pause and to fix the gaze on a single image. A recognition of the slowness in front of the continuous scrolling with which we codify the images surrounding us, inside and outside the screens.

As it was the case in previous works such as 20 Minutes of Abstract Thinking, Alain Urrutia tries to obtain something very specific from the viewer: their time. The need for a relaxed tour of the exhibition space to contemplate the images and engage in dialogue with them. The Age of Anxiety leaves behind the idea of an "empty room" in which the works of small format are mixed with the wall, and an apparently full room opens up, in which the canvases -not the images- occupy more space, causing the initial sensation of the viewer, who believes he can cover the exhibition with his eyes at the first general glance, quickly transform and are forced to retrace the steps, to start the road again and, unavoidably, to stop. As in Bernstein's symphony, the void becomes silence, and the only way out of it is to cross it in a conscious way.

The images, or meta-images, relate to each other, raise questions about their own nature, about the way we look at them, the reading we give them or the one that is given to us. All of them belong to the artist's imaginary, and although they have been conceived independently and stripped of their meaning, they belong to a plural and transversal fabric of ideas that suggest a different way of looking, in which attention becomes the key to figure out the message.

The conceptual map that accompanied the paintings in previous exhibitions and that unravelled the connections between them now disappears to make way for a conventional text [the one you are reading], which accentuates the responsibility of the viewer at the moment of reading the images. This help is no longer necessary, because they all have a double dimension; visual and textual, and are at the same time an object of study and the necessary tool for reflection.

The Age of Anxiety invites us to look once more at the modernity surrounding us and is, at the same time, a refuge from it.