Eduardo Stupía

The artist has advanced into new territories concocted by a combination of hand and eye, in an alliance that has broadened the conception of drawing creatively towards a mental hyper-reality that constantly surprises us. In his early years he created characters, creatures and objects with spectral landscapes; but later, in the eighties, hidden cities, dream landscapes and increasingly baroque, profuse, impossible buildings began to burgeon amidst the complex visual tangles of his work. As image and line became gradually more complex, he experimented with how the ink was applied to the texture and grain of the paper. The result was pictures glutted with strokes, traces and lines and the emergence of abysses and empty spaces in which one could become lost in silence. Eduardo Stupía has placed his trust, over the years, in the creativity and imagination of the viewer, who is inescapably led to overinterpret lines, faint touches, marks and brushstrokes. On this path of subtle, imagined correspondences, the meshes of the pictures that he produces appear in the manner of mirages in which every eye projects its stories. There are pictures constructed obsessively around a central focus that organises the picture space like a visual narrative. There are also pictures with many centres, in which the tension is distributed and balanced. Stupía’s work asserts its authority with its intensity. An intensity that adopts different variations and countless nuances within those variations. Sometimes the intensity is concentrated in an area that functions visually like a glowing core or a black hole; sometimes the intensity is reproduced in two sectors (in a structure bordering on symmetry), or else it explodes and disperses to generate multiple focuses of tension. The fluctuation between drawing lines and filling in areas and between multiple focuses and narrative composition becomes almost a blind action, a matter of gesture, pure movement. All his work can be conceived and seen as one enormous picture, or rather as an immense organism in which functional and constitutive depiction is thought that is thinking of itself, resulting from a logic that alternates between physical and poetic. As the concept of depiction has broadened, his work has become more uncertain and disquieting. The show that we are presenting at the IVAM features drawings and paintings made in 2008 and 2009. The exhibition catalogue contains illustrations of these works, together with essays by the curator, Francisco Calvo Serraller, and by Consuelo Císcar, Fabián Lebenglik and the artist himself.