Julio Larraz Coming Home

JULIO LARRAZ COMING HOME JULIO LARRAZ COMING HOME COMING HOME, 2013 Oil on canvas Óleo sobre tela 60 x 72 in. 152,4 x 182,8 cm JULIO LARRAZ, parallel universes BÉLGICA RODRÍGUEZ “I attempt to create a different reality where dreams serve as the foundations for a parallel universe. I do not harbor any further intention. I like to think that represented beings have a life of their own.” This frequently quoted statement by Julio Larraz is a faithful reflection of the amplitude of a painting full of codes, of secret connections, of sweet shadows that culminate as a creative act in the splendors of golden glistening disks, of blue seas and clouds. Larraz acts as a thinker, as a visual philosopher of reality, his true realism being a way of revealing on the canvas his own experiences, oscillating between life and imagination. Amid strong emotional tensions, in the silence of atmospheres en- veloping landscapes, marines and characters that, though extracted from real life, do not signify it, he solves his thematic obsessions in images frozen in time and space. A metaphysical beam touches and enlightens these obsessions of occult fires, as an imma- nence of the mysteries contained in a house, a train, a ship, a face, a body. His metaphysics obliterates the fullness of an objective world, articulated around a true reality transformed in pictorial appearances. Julio Larraz’s painting is a monologue. Somebody, or something, quietly converses with itself while retiring to the dwellings of mystery and enigma. Pictorial enigmas are solved in images withheld in memory, in communion with life and nature. In turn, adoration of life and nature starts from the passion to investigate in poetic-visual metaphors. When the artist tells us that there is something of narrative in his painting, he certainly reaches high literary decibels. Each painting is a dazzling vision, not quite for its realism, but for being so close to the everyday-life of Being, of a man or woman progressing through several existential stages where power, love, money, nature, natural or urban settings, have gnomic accents. Similar to the poets who, in a few words, can either state, offer or compose utterances of moral content, Larraz, walling up the visible realm, with a few images, often truncated or clipped, offers a full vision of subjects that deeply move the spectator. In Coming Home (2013), a yacht appears in front of the spectator, entering a tunnel located in the center of a huge solid mountain, with some visible incongruity in the relationship between the ship and the mountain, while in Cosette Aboard La Teme- bunda (2012), half a woman’s body is standing on the tip of a yacht, both of them clipped, being thus necessary to reconstruct them with the imagination. With no scorn for conventional pictorial values, Larraz invents his own ones and pro- poses the characteristic transcription of actual reality into pictorial reality. He rejects both Euclidean space and randomness, while approaching his visual response to the creative act as a coldly calculated artistic practice. Starting from metaphors extracted from an absurd universe in its different references, where the power of the image is privileged in a sense connoted by beautiful but snobbish people (elegant suits, sunglasses, fur coats), sublime landscapes, unconquerable seas, mysterious forests not aesthetically neuter, de- void of vulgarity, pictorial metaphors bring into consideration a peculiar meaning of the notion of beauty. Morphologically, Julio Larraz’s painting implies the most essential in the frontal and flat dimensions starting from two points of view free from Euclidean perspective, though keeping an aerial one. A point outlines the absolutely frontal vision in the paintings of figures and objects in For Amelia (2013), and the omniscient vision, especially in the landscapes that seem aerial views of the thematic object, in Wrong Turn (2012) or City of New Orleans (2011). In the presentation of the “scene,” on the surface of the canvas or from the zenithal (omniscient, aerial) point of view, a strange perspective, not very common in contemporary painting, breaks the order of the formal, conventional codes characterized by planes adjusted to the presence of one or several flight points, so that a geometry intrinsic to the work itself orders the forms, almost always enlarged in the foreground. Without modulations, the three-dimensional dialectics of the images treated in a naturalistic way, “frozen” in space, almost like a still-life, corresponds to a strict organization of the figurative planes related to their thematic meaning. From a formalistic point of view, line and color build the figure-form. A wide scale oc- cupies almost the entirety of the canvas. Generally of huge proportions, the dimension of the painting is intimately related with the spectator’s scale, entering in his vision as the interpretation of experience and space that his sensibility is capable of giving. Also, the dimensions have been deliberately calculated according to the selected topic and the elements to interpret it. There is something surrealistic in the rupture of the scale of the objects or characters, in the unusual elements introduced, in the ambiguity of the pictorial space in I Don’t Forget Your Smile (2012), but nothing is left to objective randomness. There is neither presence of the subconscious nor of dreams here; it is rather about reality being apparently transformed, of contemporary reality caught in its frag- 7 ments. The intrinsic expressiveness of color is very important in Larraz’s painting; his palette is infinite, imbued in some cases with symbolic rather than visual values. The brightness acquired by the treatment of light, which many critics have defined as the light of the tropics, is quite important. But his is a universal light, a light of great pictorial value that, on the canvas, defines the form as solid and real. Forms which the artist relates with each other, building a cohesively expressive whole of real situations, exaggerating sometimes the proportions and details of characters typified by their attires and expres- sions, always belonging to areas of political and economic power. The topics that draw Julio Larraz’s attention are varied. Though one of them would seem to be the critique of consumerist society, women in furs getting off a light plane, others in bikinis enjoying themselves on a yacht, men smoking cigars, etc., implying a relentless criticism to consumerist and frivolous contemporary society, this is not the case. His is a disciplined statement of a pictorial fact with defined topics and latent sen- suality. And it is here indeed where imagination and reality work together in relation to a painting bound to our twentieth century and extrapolated to the twenty-first, and especially to the nineteen-sixties, when “voyeurism” was an important part of pictorial discourse (David Hockney, Francis Bacon). Larraz looks for a window and transforms the images into fragments of the observed, or remembered, reality, which he details without being hyper-realist, representing it with abundant descriptions. His is a phe- nomenological response to a representational fact of pictorial character. When analyzing Larraz’s work in its compositional structure, it could be considered a summary of proposals characteristic of the historical vanguards of the twentieth century. He thus responds with vehemence to what has been known as the crisis of figurative values of the middle of that century, assuming certain surrealistic features such as the “unex- pected” appearance of forms in apparent discordance with the main characters; when he breaks bodies and objects into fragments, showing only one of their components, when the prow of a boat or yacht perforates the surface of the canvas from left or right, when an airplane is practically seen from only one of its angles. In short, it is an entire alienation process toward a stereotype of advertising “cliché,” an anti-topic phenomenon perfectly located on the screen of the supporting canvas or paper. Larraz, like American artist Rauschenberg, works in the breach that exists between art and life. It is in fact on this breach that this Cuban-American artist, in an attempt to demystify painting and its topics, but with an absolute respect for the discipline, integrates deliberate provocations, distor- tions of a “Villa Anatolia” and its enigmas, sublime and solitary landscapes amid a totality that is nothingness−The Grounds of Villa Anatolia (2012), or The Island of Falconera (2013). It has been stated that Larraz’s topics are not criticisms (or denounces) of social, economic, political and even artistic upper-classes. Although these beautiful, sophisticated people are taken from the social pages of newspapers, it is obvious that he assumes them as subjects absolutely susceptible of a pictorial-plastic interpretation, that even when he “depicts” a reality, it is always the artist’s personal vision. These figures seem like rather ornamental “objects,” however deprived of their actual condition. In them a metamor- phosis of their own urban sense has taken place, thus it is not possible to classify this painting as critical to a certain social segment, but rather as satirical toward a certain contemporary reality. They are satires loaded with black humor, in which, paradoxically, a certain degree of fondness, of happiness, of beauty, of lyricism, can be perceived. They are obsessions of the artist’s systematic character reflected in connotations of systems of significances not referred to the dialectical relationship between the real and the un- real. Nor are they in fact non-existent, since they are all part of the spectator’s imagery. Here, Larraz works submerged in the breach mentioned by Rauschenberg between the imaginary (painting) and the reality (life); its peculiarity is that the “scene” is never com- plete, it is a puzzle that should be completed as the authentic message offered by the artist’s rigorous pictorial discipline, being neither anecdotic nor critical, but just art.

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