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Lyricism intended as creative tension in reference to reality, history,
one’s own lived experience. The act of artistic creation intended as a
purely liberating moment, and therefore such that it reveals itself to
be a veritable existential necessity.
The expressive code deployed by Angel Orensanz derives from being, which,
intimately, plumbs mysterious depths and then leads back, inevitably, to
being. The artistic and civil commitment of this maestro – the volcanic
alchemist from Aragon – can be found in his molding the remnants of the
genetic memory that each of us has. With this he constructs a possible,
effective dialogue between himself (the artist) and the other, the
beneficiary of his work, to whom, in a certain sense, the artist
consciously consigns himself.
Even though he transversally sifts through and draws from a diverse
array of cultural influences and matrices, Angel Orensanz’s current work
is ever more characterized by a consciously defiant attitude to imposed
and pre-determined infertile models, models which have lost their
intrinsic value, have been deprived of their intensity and are devoid of
any communicative tension whatsoever due to their prosaic and singular
conformity to an ideal which, in the final analysis, is most decidedly a
“non-ideal”. It is from these considerations that Angel’s efficacious
agenda determines its onslaught. His aim is to substitute barrenness
with the lyrical illusion of a non-beginning, virtually “withering” and
“razing” the present, retrieving that initial trace through a forceful
excavation of what we know to be the most inaccessible and hidden
recesses of our own perception and comprehension. Angel’s method once
again demonstrates our belonging to a reality which is not simply
psychological, but at one and the same time psychic, affective and
mental.
However, the self-same illusion the artist is looking for is
irremediably thwarted at the outset, destroyed as it is being brought to
life.
This is the only reality a work of art is able to confront. Hence the
material a work of art is composed of is no longer simply a means: it is
the reality the artist works and immerses himself in and, by doing this,
identifies himself with. Through analyzing internal conflict, the artist
turns to the Real and tries to grasp those elements which are
increasingly emotional if not flatly dramatic. Orensanz moves like an
acrobat between impression and expression, whether he is dealing with
sculpture, drawing or performance. Each and every gesture is
characterized by a sustained, constant vitality which is able to unleash
almost limitless energy – a value inherent within art – at the climax of
its unfolding.
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Angel’s works (so luminous,
musical, rhythmic and harmonious) courageously ask to be inserted within
the day-to-day connivance that shuns the anecdotal. The endless dialogue
between opposites brings to the fore the author-demiurge who is
attempting to dominate and control matter, composing and decomposing it
through a constant reflection that leads the observer to the awareness
of a possible ethical revolution able to initiate a “possible new civil
and social world" that does not have to be sought elsewhere – it is here,
now, where we all live, operate and exist. An “other” world that is a
concrete image of a constantly-moving perfection, capable of breaking
through the apparent viscosity of a pre-established, disheartening
bourgeois stability.
Angel Orensanz’s are veritable “phantasmagorical interventions” in that
they are difficult to contextualize. Even more so if we are talking in
strictly commercial terms.
The artist is simply interested in work based on poiesis, on the pure
act of artistic doing, where matter becomes the continual flow of
reality and existence in that it is the most sensitive of elements,
ready to seize the internal impulses that the artificer, through
manipulation, transmits.
Form rises to the surface from matter itself as it is already implicit
and exists within matter: the artist’s task is simply to unveil it,
through appearance, through a process of subtraction.
Orensanz’s communicative urgency thus appears to move along a set of
binary tracks: by exalting the qualities ingrained within matter and
used to make art and by transforming matter itself into a reservoir of
symbolic codes from which to draw one's own knowledge, the artist is
able to extricate a specific ideological motivation – that of defining a
more immediate and direct relationship with the existing such that he is
able to thoroughly examine all phenomenological contradictions. In fact,
without excluding the emotional charge which lies behind the creative
act, memory alone can conserve its functional value qua quality of
experience; it is only by transforming the character into a language
which is as essential and de-structured as possible that a “flexible”
discourse can be broached. This discourse alone is able to define and
trigger off an uncommon yet intense communicative dynamism beyond
historical preliminaries.
©World
Of Art magazine
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