Rafael Fuster

Rafael Fuster - TRIBUTE TO GIORGIA O'KEEFFE

Technique: Acrylic on canvas

Artist Biography: The work of Rafael Fuster (Murcia, 1978) has been characterised from the outset by a reflection on the limits of perception. A baroque game with the spectator's eye that questions the relationship between what we see and what exists, the tension between what we think things are and the experience of what they really are. Through meticulous sculptural work, his earlier works put this tension into practice. A precise representation of the world that managed to confuse the eye and challenged knowledge through vision. The hardness and solidity of the metal from which the sculpture was made adopted the characteristics of the ductility and fragility of paper, also the waste objects represented by the sculpture. Although illusion and simulacrum were fundamental, this was not an eye-roller tout court. Unlike baroque compositions where, after the deception became evident, the works ceased to make sense, Fuster's sculptures continued to maintain the tension between the imagined world and the real world. When we touched the object - whether by touch or haptic gaze - and unveiled the supposed deception, the illusory property did not entirely disappear. Somehow, the lightness of the paper, its fragility, was still present and we could no longer shake it off. Rather than deceiving the eye, what the artist was doing was projecting qualities onto the materials that remained there forever. These qualities are not only physical, but have to do, at bottom, with a series of ideas about the world - precariousness, abandonment, residuality... - that permeate the discourse of the work. The process of "confusion of the gaze" with which Rafael Fuster works is brought about by the acute and precise work of mimesis, but also - perhaps even more so - by the object of representation: the residue. As we have written elsewhere, his work can be understood as an "allegory of residuality".