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ANDREA
PAGNEZ
Anatomy
of an Artistic Spirit - Angel Orensanz |
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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 moulding 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 characterised 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.
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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 analysing 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
characterised by a sustained, constant vitality which is able to unleash
almost limitless energy – a value inherent within art – at the climax of
its unfolding.
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
contextualise. Even more so if we are talking in strictly commercial
terms. |
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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.
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Andrea Pagnes
November 2003
Andrea Pagnes is an
artist, writer, curator and senior editor for the international art
and culture magazine World of Art. He lives in Venice. |
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