I learned that life is wind, and I let myself be carried away by it

Juan Nördlinger – WALKING

Life has led me to travel at least two paths that are commonly considered forked. The first was the scientific one, in which I chose one of his sensitive paths, the one with a reparative power that restores people’s quality of life. The second was art, which provided me with another reflective order and an aesthetic knowledge of the world.

Two magnitudes of creation: in science, the limits are precise; in art, no. Two creative, positively imaginative and artisan instances. The permanent search for innovation has marked my developments in both fields, both in the usage of materials and techniques, as well as in the incorporation of transforming ideas and concepts of doing in its canonical aspects. Whenever the processes are proven and efficient, I look for something else, an alternative, a drift, that enriches my work. In one direction and another, passion has always been the motor of my action. I fall in love with both practices and the chores that I display in them.

Painting

When I am asked about what painting means, my answer is: passion. A lot of it. The kind that makes it possible to face emotions as diverse as insecurities, joy, and the frustrations that any activity entails at different times. Painting is a kind of complex movement that implies unfolding – exposing oneself to an exterior, thinking and changing world – and withdrawing – submerging oneself in an interior, sensitive and infinite world; it is then learning to see, look, and observe, both inside and outside, and to show with the help of colour a way of feeling life and living it.

I feel that every painting is, when it begins, an enigma to be solved. Perhaps this impression is answered with commentaries that my images “inhabited with a certain mystery”, “with magical aspects of uncertain explanation…” evoke. Any blank canvas encourages staining, invites a conversation… also with other images and gestures. It is the moment in which a visual thought flows which, after being sketched, defines a pictorial reality and a conception of sensitive space that departs from conventional meanings. It is a slow, laborious process, which contains moments of counterpoint and moments of harmony. A process where pleasure becomes the substance of expression, where experimentation entails periods of anguish and moments of joy that make painting always a wonderful company… in fact, much more than this.

Thinking

I always look for discomfort, an arrhythmia, an injury in the work. It may be the problematic link between the evanescent form and the moving background confronted in an oscillating role; or of a transparency of the shapes that enhance the virtues of colour. A game of disagreements regulates the intricate links between the inside, the outside and the entire pictorial space that perspective and three-dimension are unable to explain. And, at the same time, my paintings appear familiar to the viewer’s perception, since they refer to canonical genres: landscapes, still lives, interiors, portraits, nudes. In this correlate, figural aspects tending to abstraction frequently appear, which coexist with icons with a decorative function – either naturalistic or geometric -, and even symbols that carry strong significance for the members of a given culture and perhaps a pure formal value for them. Those who do not belong to it. There are those who link the result of my work with an aftertaste of “intimacy” which, certainly, is not alien to me and perhaps responds to the way in which I conceive my artistic task: a painting for the inside.

Painting is time, a dialogue, and because I learned that life is wind, I always try that my painting say something, to the soul.

Juan R. Nördlinger