Oteiza

The Basque sculptor takes his drawings to his personal militant terrain, explicitly expressed by identifying phalluses with battering rams. An essentially offensive battering ram, but as well, to a lesser extent, defensive, and even of stigmatising humour depending on his mood shifts. Jorge Oteiza was unpredictable. Passionate to the soul, he would go from euphoria to melancholy relatively easily. He suffered many frustrations, but acknowledging his temper, which he had a lot of, he was, overall, divinely impatient. Man of public spaces, and, therefore, preacher, he was constantly sensitive, thought and action. On the other hand, as a childish being -category related to being an artist- he alternatively showed spontaneity, naivety and generosity, which, depending on and how, could turn into mistrust and resentment. In a certain way, the world of art, even more than life itself, kept him in a constant defensive stress, generating regular explosions. Many of these aspects are reflected in his written and published work, which is plentiful, rich and complex. Rich in information and full of stunning intuitions. We could ask ourselves if these pictures are erotic or pornographic, or perhaps just daring, but not because of their sexual motivation, they are daring in a much more tribal sense. Those in which Oteiza portraits himself in a truly cartoonish way, armed, I couldn’t have said it better, with a phallus “in a charging manner”. In them lies an evocation to ancient Greco-Roman sexual fetishism, most of them proceeding from Dionysian cults, of explicit celebrations. Or even before if we go back to prehistory, which was significantly important for Oteiza. But his intentions appear to be closer to medieval Goliardesque tradition, later transformed in modern ages by Rebelais, who mixes everything with sexuality as a pandemonium of corporality and a permanent spring of human instinctive ferocity. In any case, it is in the written legends usually accompanying his drawings where his battling conception of phalluscentrism is revealed. These comments highlight, including artistic policy, what these drawings represent, charging against well known critics or powerful Spanish art administrators as well as Francoist politics and the events of the so called democratic transition, where his frustrations regarding what he understood should be the present and future of the Basque country were intensified. Although these drawings have an easy going and relaxed aspect, they transmit more rage than humour. And from a formal point of view, they not only remind us Oteiza is a sculptor, but sometimes make us recall the traces of masters which he undoubtedly admired, such as Goya. Oteiza’s erotic drawings are just a tiny part of the tremendous amount of notes and sketches which the artist wrote on notebooks and loose papers, where many other matters are addressed, many of them, logically, are strictly artistic.