Joaquin Lara

Joaquin Lara - Unknown Territory 11

Artist Biography: Joaquin Lara painter and photographer.It all starts around the eighties. After passing through the Faculty of Information Sciences, Joaquin Lara began his career in photography, publishing in the magazine Muscaria, with Oscar Amézaga, Roge Blasco, Roberto Moso, etc. He soon realized that he was more interested in artistic photography than in journalism. He began to wander through different workshops in Bilbao, Pepe Barceló, Roscubas where he met Carmelo Camacho and Fernando Biderbost where his love for painting was immediate, starting to paint professionally in Fernando's studio "La Hispano Suiza". From there it was not long before the exhibitions, both individual and collective, the competitions, with some success that give him some encouragement to continue. At the end of the eighties he manages to enter the Arteleku workshops with Frederic Amat, which completely changes his vision of painting. The daily presence of Zumeta creating his gigantic serigraphs, were three months where everything changes. With that background and a head full of projects, Joaquin Lara moved to a much larger workshop in Las Cortes, in Bilbao, with Fernando Galvan and Carmelo Camacho. In the mid-nineties he starts to move the work; Barrainkua, Arriola Cultur Etxea (Peio Aguirre curator), Talleres Abiertos La Bolsa Bilbao, he participates in the event "En Canal" in an industrial building in Zorrozaurre with Alberto Lomas as curator, Espacio Grossi, etc. At the end of the nineties, he moved to Vitoria where he began a new stage, meeting artists such as; Imanol Marrodán, Koko Rico, Edurne Herran, Iban Arroniz, Iñaki Larrimbe, Dorleta Ortiz de Elgea... My first exhibition in Vitoria, in 1998, in the Cultural Center of Montehermoso "El Recorrido de Los Objetos", "Horror Vacui" in Espazio Zuloa" following multiple collective and individual exhibitions at the beginning of the new century, such as "La Vida Mixta" in the Txema Burgos Gallery in Bilbao, "Piktoplastikos" in the Caja Vital, "P.B.Series" Gallery Jamete Cuenca, "Territorio Desconocido" gallery Blanca Soto Madrid, and so on. His work is present in various institutions and private collections.

 

Title: Unknown Territory 11 (series) 2021 Technique enamel, acrylic on canvas 95 x 70 x 2 cm. UNKNOWN TERRITORY The painting to the rescue of a "moment" in the flow of the landscape. The registration of a sense in the constant transformation of an environment that struggles to recover another balance. The provisional; the arbitrary; the casual as a referent. Marcel Mariën's phrase "before creation, God did not exist" comes to mind. What surrounds the work is the contingent, the fragmentary, the ephemeral, the "confused mass", the chaos. Artistic practice, like any other medium, through the synergy that emerges from the discovery, helps the author to glimpse the essential. The work is a microcosm where the author rehearses solutions that unravel that "anima mundi", that harmony that lies behind the chaotic appearance of reality. The artist faces a project without hierarchies, in constant collision, a mixture of spurious techniques that interfere with each other, collapsing the medium and the message. The different stages are superimposed in accelerated entropy, remnants of meaning drift adrift trying to group and metamorphose. The artist, perplexed, makes a gesture and observes himself intervening. The event extinguishes the incipient order, very soon, silently, another order, this one more complex, but already bastard, without legitimacy, clings to the object. Will it be aesthetically viable? The shipwreck is imminent, the work sinks into insignificance. Dissonances, flagrant contradictions, rectifications... The amorphous consolidates step by step. "Perhaps," as Adorno says, "one of the tasks of art consists in expressing the inarticulate and the inchoate, nonsensical and arbitrary from the perspective of the articulate and formed, without rationalizing and socializing it. For him, "the task of art is not to create an articulated form, but to reinvent the amorphous and inarticulate.... Only by deforming or decomposing what has already been collectively formed in order to directly achieve formlessness, or by having the force of artistic will to directly illuminate the amorphous, can one grasp, even if only in the abstract, a certain appearance of uniqueness." Back to the work, time has decanted its meaning, the full gives way to the empty, another cycle begins. The artist approaches the painting whispering, his method consists of rehearsing and exploring as someone who cautiously penetrates an unknown territory.