ARQUE+GRAFÍAS

If I had to name the companions I have had along my artistic journey, especially those who have been closer to me over the last few years, I would say Joaquín Torres García, a fellow countryman whose work I knew as a child through my father ; I would also name Brancusi, Oteiza and Mark Rothko. With these masters I share the aspiration to reveal the soul in each piece, to explore the depths of the human spirit.  Far from a cold rationalism and a purely formal geometry, they have developed a responsive geometry that allows to perceive an ethical proposal as the basis on which to build the aesthetics of the work of art.  I am in debt with these men with whom I share this aspiration. Their lives and work have embodied art, in the words of Oteiza “to build man”, to raise him to his utmost capabilities, drawing him as near as possible to his human essence, treading the path of renouncement and synthesis towards clarity.

My intention through my work is that the strength of symbol may meet its material reality (sculpture) and its presence  may convey its transcendental quality, provoking a beneficial  emotion in the viewer. The ancestral and archetypical symbol of the cross,  alluding to the prehistoric primary gesture, the origins, is used as the structural and constructive element  around which the sculpture’s symmetry is organised.  

                                                                                                                                             Urta

                                                                                                                                             Valencia, october 2012

                                                                                         On ARQUE+GRAFÍAS

Under the title Arque+Grafías, Urta introduces us into a fascinating world, unifying the semantic enigma contained in the universality of the symbol.  His symmetries, alluding to the origins of the idea of organisation, are aesthetic expressions that consolidate spiritual, religious, political and social models… The artist’s search for emotional, intellectual and formal synthesis has drawn him towards plaster, a primary though refined material of nature; a material that has been underestimated to the point of oblivion but that is essential in the path of sculpture; a reviled material that gifted him the Bancaja award, where his plaster fragments burst as testimonials in a general discourse of questions with no answer.

Presented as prototypes –another conception of organisation and time-, his pieces suggest a journey to the viewer’s eye, with its subsequent -linguistic, analogical, random- personal course, that might as well be circular. This question is accentuated in the central piece of this assembly: a melting pot rooted in ritual, where symbol, matter and life dissolve into their shapeless matrix.  End and beginning. 

                                                                                                                                                             Christian Parra Duhalde ©

                                                                                                                                                              Writer, journalist and art critic.

                                                                                                                                                              Valencia, October, 2012