Voluntad de objeto

This exhibition covers the last ten years of the work of Rubén Guerrero (Seville, 1976), through a series of pictorial works set up to dialogue – and even discuss – with each other by means of groups adapted to the spatial division of the Claustrón Sur of the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. Alongside the paintings, in the great corridor that unites the whole space, the artist has agreed to show for the first time a selection of models that he himself constructs as a phase prior to or contemporaneous with the making of his paintings. But this acceptance has a trick: some of them have been reconstructed, and all but two have been included in an exhibition display in the form of tables that allow a view from above and around them. Ángel Calvo Ulloa has pointed out in this respect that “the models do not occupy the place of a model, they are not presented as an image ready to be transferred to the canvas, but rather they are perhaps more in keeping with a logic that poses alterations in perception”.
However, and despite the risk that this novelty entails with respect to the prominence of the self-referential and the process of creation of the pictorial image in his painting, the viewer should not be distracted and should concentrate his attention especially on his paintings and on the relationships established between them in the different rooms, since, as Joaquín Jesús Sánchez has written, his work “produces a cascade of mirages: the abstract that is extracted from the concrete, the industrial that is domestic, the random that is premeditated. This continuous escapism of his work allows an equally fragmentary and rich cascade of interpretations”.
In addition to a room dedicated to his drawings, to his work on paper -almost always more direct and immediate-, Rubén Guerrero presents, at the end of the tour, a large new painting, with references to Hugo Ball and the relational, perhaps because, as Juan Canela points out, it is necessary to shift “the focus from the representational to the performative, and let ourselves be affected by his presence. To be able to understand his pictorial materiality from the place of action, of dialogue, of conversation with the bodies”. To go through Rubén Guerrero’s last ten years, therefore, is to understand his idea of painting as a will of the object.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)