ELORZA’S TEMPORAL MIRRORS

 Observing Jose Ramon Elorza’s last paintings, it’s inevitable to remember Heraclite’s words: “Everything flows, nothing stays still” and at the same time accept its equivalence with our metamorphic reality, where the image of constant change, accelerated time and its fragmentary character, pervades and determines contemporary artistic creation.

 Mr. Elorza’s works, not only do they drift us into the aquatic medium, as the main principle, but they also take us to the geometric point ( of divisible and especial character) and to the physical atom, which hovers in the vacuum, in constant movement, ruled by the law of opposites. It is the apprehension of reality conceived as the equilibrium between the continuity  - discontinuity, where there is no beginning and no end, and as a result it is impossible to define or grasp. Consequently, it is a universe without aim in continuous metamorphose and where its diametrically opposed elements provoke relations of tension and power, thus giving vent to emotions, sensations and intuitions.  

 Elorza’s painting technique works as a mirror, which makes things turn up, in their immediacy to be grasped and named in a fleeting glimpse, the way they exist in nature. It is the reflection of a double tension, which offers us the secret side of things,  sometimes in an apparent way, whilst we are confronted with deciduousness and with the fact that in the changing process a glimpse of future is depicted. Things are just prints, suspensions and, paraphrasing Heidegger, “oscillations”, whose emphasis is based on the process of changing, and not in the essence of being.

             At the same time, Elorza’s paintings work as a universal stave, a floating opera, a system of infinite musical notes which intertwine and interact with tones which expand and diminish, following a never-ending and secret concert made to break the silence.

             To sum up, it is a poetical and aesthetic discourse, made with sensitivity and intimate questioning, depicting instants of a structure which is not but the mere inquiries in an always open judgement and where movement takes deep images of unconsciousness into reality.

             Baudelaire insisted on the capital importance of lines and colour in a painting.

             Elorza’s work is a set of force fields drawn by means of lines, planes and colours which develop through the biomorphic  principle which opposes the organic cell and its growing processes which turn it into geometric form, and its operative processes. So, it is a work about dynamic elementalism and operative processes, which get away from static elementalism and Mondrian’s speculative process.

             Elorza’s space is a neoplasticist space based on visual perception. It is the space of conscience that turns into form, a conscience which describes to us what is happening and the relationships between things. It is a rational-empirical construction of images full of immateriality and levitation as visible substances do not have matter’s physical weight and its shapes are transparent surfaces and geometric solids at the same time.

             Elorza does not decorate, but restructures the environment visually, superimposing it onto significant atmospheres –sometimes hot, lukewarm or cold- an architecture of coloured shapes, always circular or oval, driven by their own impulse and rhythm, breaking the surfaces into planes with depth.

             It is the representation of a dynamic and dialectic organism whose system exerts multiple tensions and opposite forces, and whose pictorial space turns into an aporetical space where form and content interact. The biomorphic elements – genuine pictorial signs- turn into a visible unity of space and time, with a rhythm that generates the functions of depth and light, representing masses which, because of their own nature tend to dilate and shrink, to emerge and sink, influenced by the interaction created by some over the others  and by their own simultaneous and opposite forces, reflected in a subtle urbane network of horizontal and vertical lines.

             Depth and figures (form and content) work in unison in this plastic space; simultaneously blending in this plastic space  time, intensities, frequencies, ties and distances, which communicate some immanent planes with others, pointing out the succession of  concepts and creating a somehow plastic cartography of life.

             Rich and fecund translucent liquidity, a territory of sensations, acrylic veilings: structural and figurative, distanced and hot, sharp and fragile, constructive and transgressing , which do not elude any of the contradictory factors which made them possible.

             Time and space are considered as superimposed acts where the formal dialectics of “being-not being”, “inside-outside”, “bright-dark”, “positive-negative” mix in an intense and rich dialectic.

             Elorza is a professional artist, a cook of  colour, of deep lyric plasticity who explores the very craftsmanship of  the art of painting, its organic makeup and the effects and resources which give form to plastic expression.

             In all his works, there is a quest for purity, for the essential and for the synthesis that shows up in his constructive rigour. Mr. Elorza deals with his work from a distance, aware of the importance of shape, its possible tensions, and little by little discovering its contradictions. Painting is not the only thing at stake, creating is also important, going to and fro among identifications, submerging in them and, at the same time, dissociating oneself from them.

             His experience is backed up by visual order, he is interested in flowing time, in the internal rhythm of things and in the effect that these mutations  exert on our senses; and above all, in this CROSSROADS that painting allows, to elevate above the line of the horizon.                                                       

                                                                                   By Artemis OLAIZOLA.