7 October 2009

Conference

Around a exhibition: Ruiz de Eguino in the Pamplona Citadel

D. Francisco Javier Zubiaur Carreño.
Museum of Navarre

The lecture focused on the commentary of the sculptural exhibition "Formulaciones en el espacio", which took place in the Mixed Pavilion of the Pamplona Citadel between 18 September and 15 November 2009, and the presentation of the multifaceted personality of its author, Iñaki Ruiz de Eguino, who explained, together with the art historian Francisco Javier Zubiaur, the themes of his formal search and his particular evolution.

Three ideas were highlighted:
Firstly, the multifaceted personality of this artist, born in San Sebastián in 1953, writer, art critic, exhibition curator, painter and sculptor at the same time, aspects that derive from his perpetual restlessness, his inclination towards research, and his capacity for work.

As an artist, and in relation to what was exhibited, his formal and spatial research was highlighted, which unfolds over several phases without renouncing a priori to any procedure or material of execution:
- Abstract expressionist painting of a lyrical order and spatialist will between 1973 and 1976.
- His interest in formal construction from 1978 onwards, which led to painting and silkscreen printing ("magical cosmogonic realism" series).
- The progress of his investigations with the series "Tetra dimensional painting", from 1982, which aligns him as an abstract-geometric artist connected with the classical avant-garde, focusing him on the analysis of infinite space. His vectors are the clarity of design, the simplicity of forms, scale and light-chromatic modulation, and his result an ordered serenity and a suggestive musicality of rhythms and compensatory forms which, due to its dynamism, is close to Russian constructivism.
- In the mid-1980s, contact with Oteiza, Chillida and Mendiburu, led him to return to the sculpture he had abandoned in the early 1970s in favour of painting and engraving. He approached sculpture from different perspectives: synthetic cubism, constructivism and, in painting, neoplasticism, reaffirming himself in the spatial research with an abstract tendency, to which his relationship with Morellet, one of the precursors of minimalism and a cultivator of optical scientism, is not unconnected. His work is still in this phase, and part of his result can be seen in the exhibition under analysis.

And, lastly, the fusion in his work of such European abstract-geometric currents, of the purest avant-garde, with the Basque sculpture of our contemporaneity, with which he shares respect for the subject and the surrounding living space, overcoming appearance and the search for invisible Structures , more stylistic gravity in the formal. To these constants, Ruiz de Eguino adds a feeling for beauty, more or less controlled, both in his sculpture and in his abstract painting, which distances him from pure scientific geometrism and brings him closer to the lyrical abstracts.
 

Iñaki Ruiz de Eguino, "Construction with flat units in space XVII".
1985/2007. Hondarribia Workshop

Iñaki Ruiz de Eguino, "Habitación mística". 1989/2006. Hondarribia Workshop

Iñaki Ruiz de Eguino, "Monument to the Milagro Cherry". Peace Park. Milagro