Reflection

About

Francisco Ugarte´s work seeks out encounters. Coincidental moments : between one material and another, between surroundings and the work with the audience; or between a specific time with daylight. The artist shares his fascination for the present; for that essential element which is here and has always been, either hidden or masked behind a veil. Ugarte´s work intends to make us aware of elementary features to better perceive time and space. Hence the use of light and all related phenomena (shadows, reflections, chiaroscuros) as central themes in his work frequently expressed through drawing. A specific type of drawing that borderlines writing (i wish i could paint a beautiful landscape), used as a tool for exploration and knowledge. A drawing that should be understood here as the contact and reflection of two vital sets for the artistic creation: paper and graphite, lines and circles.

Reflection by Francisco Ugarte could be an echo (reflection) of his homonymous book, carefully published by the editorial seal Mixedmedia.press, but not only that. The linear reading experience of the book, which involves the performative process accomplished by the artist filling a notebook with simple strokes and then closing it to generate these graphite reflections on paper; the continuum of leafing through the book from left to right, noticing a kind of narrative in the various drawings and their reflections, reliving the moment in which the artist's body and mind are dedicated to a single activity, are all fully and openly offered in this exhibition, observable at a single glance. This illusion of openness and simultaneity, far from trying to satisfy the compulsive need to embrace everything quickly and without the slightest attention, demands from the public a certain detachment - visual and mental -; it symbolizes, in addition, Ugarte´s constant search: the ever-present moment where time passes.

The large-format diptychs reproduce with great detail what was a quasi-random scrawl - in the style of Shodō, the art of Japanese calligraphy - and its corresponding trace when confronted with paper. This action in which the artist has neither total control of the result, nor is the direct author of the stroke. What was an abstract drawing is translated meticulously on a large scale, transforming into a hyper realistic work. The original drawing is instinctive; the larger replica, its expanded reflection, instead, arises from a well thought-out handcrafted work.

From the minimalism, Zen experience and methodology of architecture, Francisco Ugarte seems to blur in this exhibition the limits between space and time, abstraction and realism; while he expresses the admiration for being present: to produce shadow, trace, reflection.