NARCISUS’S MIRRORS

            I do not have a soft spot for Greek mithologies (which  are without exeption of an exagerated figurativism. Besides, Elorza never went through this stage of the adolescent artist before he arrived at his everlasting abstract); but we can break, iconoclasts as we are, all the Greco-roman imagery revealing to the world that Narcisus’s mirrors were all varied, and that he never fell in love with himself, but with water, when he realised that one never looks at himself in the same lake. The first time Elorza showed me his work at that gurgling waterspring where he works, a good definition for Alzola, he admitted that, to a great extent, his paintings have a very aquatic nature, that of a porthole through which captain Nemo would only see trouts and jellyfish. But an artist, imaginative being as he is, perceives other dimensions. I have happened to compare a painting with an open window towards the fantasizing  infinite many times (something conventional whose dimensions do not end in the frame). With Elorza, I felt submerged and do not think this is easy. I sensed myself to be completely amphibious. I knew that this artist from the Low Deba distinguished, depending on humour, the translucent liquidity, similar to a swimming-pool with wild violent tempests. After all a veil of paint  always insists on water, whether in a drinking jug or whether this is oneiric. Elorza has always managed , although he does not reveal it, to paint veils with acrylic paint ( so reviled by old fogies). On the other hand, and not to lose touch with the Renaissance tradition ( we are always being reborn in art) he makes his own canvasses and he is the one who prepares their texture – his peculiar “sperm whale” texture- to avoid too smooth a touch. 

 When entering the exposition rooms in Sanz Enea, everybody will think that all they see is a return to psychedelia: but be careful, because this impression could be deceiving. There is no revival or remake. One simply keeps in the fish’s prodigious memory the pictures that failed because of their excessively geometric character, their bizarre obedience to a disciplined Bauhaus and their beatle-rolling sountrack. When, all of a sudden, José Ramón Elorza   makes me put my ear on a seaweed and listen to Debussy, who was also ‘acid’ in his own times. The best thing I have found in Elorza’s canvasses is that you dive into them. And it is difficult to get out of them.

                                                                        By Rafael CASTELLANO.