20171025_MUN_JuanUgalde

"In this work I confront my inner world, which I access through painting, with the outside, which is represented by the photographs belonging to the collection of the University of Navarra Museum" explained Juan Ugalde about his latest exhibition work . graduate Public works. In the sample reality and humor, fantasy and nonsense confront each other. "Photography is a point of reality goal, although less and less. It provides a cold, specific fact. With painting I seek to transform that reality and attention to do so with a grade of humor," he added.

Although Juan Ugalde is a painter, one of the procedures he uses most frequently is collage: he incorporates postcards, photographs bought at flea markets or taken by himself into his canvases, with which he generates compositions that mix heterogeneous elements, in an aesthetic that has sometimes been linked to pop. "The albums and photographs from the collection of the Museo Universidad de Navarra fit perfectly with my work. I usually use photographs of flea markets, family members... and on top of them I add characters and other elements," Ugalde commented.

The word the artist uses most frequently when referring to his series of public works is "nonsense". Public works is "disparate". The term refers to the Disparates, the last of the great series engraved by Goya, which presents a series of rather enigmatic scenes, between comical and threatening, which scholars are unable to explain. But for Ugalde, nonsense refers to "the nonsense generated by progress, by the development of the human being in the last century and a half". The author mixes current or future forms and elements with those of the past: cars, helicopters, machines, chimneys, constructions, etc. Generating, on the other hand, a subject of reality between some times and others in which the characters of the original photos suddenly appear posing in a new crazy space and as if about to explode. The exhibition conference room also includes fragments of Así se fundó Carnaby Street, by Leopoldo María Panero. In Panero's collection of poems there is no clear thread nor is it possible to find anecdotes, everything is based on automatic writing and free association and this is precisely what interests Juan Ugalde.

In 2003, the Museum's artistic directors, Rafael Levenfeld and Valentín Vallhonrat approached the artist with the request goal that he investigate the collection of the then Photographic Fund of the University of Navarra. "Juan was interested in those photographs in our collection that are related to public works. He wanted to work with the works of Charles Clifford, Jean Laurent, José Martínez Sánchez or Auguste Muriel where the images show the transition from a rural country to an industrialized one. To these images he brings his acid look," explained Rafael Levenfeld.