Leaflet Press release

Artist José Ramón Amondarain's project Tiempo y Urgencia (Guernica) (Time and Urgency (Guernica)) is the outcome of extensive research into the limits of representation. The project consists of an installation work titled Urgencia (Urgency) and the 1:1 reproduction of 8 photographs in gouache.

Urgencia (an anagram of Guernica) is an enormous installation comprising 8 large canvases that represents a manifold analysis of art, its boundaries and functions, through the representation of the iconic painting made 75 years ago today, Guernica by Pablo Picasso. Through this proposal, J. R. Amondarain and ARTIUM take a closer look at the process of creating the work, analyze its iconic value and reflect on its impact today.

The exhibition coincides with the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica and Pablo Picasso's creation of this great work, named after the town because of the indignation the event sparked in the artist, as it had in public opinion in Europe and the rest of the world. The now legendary painting becomes an example of how atemporality, or rather continuing temporality within or parallel to real time, is possible, and embodies the social attention directed to art from multiple perspectives and viewpoints—social, economic, cultural, political, discursive and iconic.

In a process paralleling that followed today by this artist from San Sebastián, Guernica was created with great urgency and at a very specific time, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. It was adapted from a work commissioned from Picasso by the government of the Spanish Republic for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. Photographer Dora Maar documented the process of its creation, and J. R. Amondarain has used these snapshots today to create his work.

The exhibition
Mimesis, copy and original become key concepts when approaching the exhibition discourse. Amondarain's work brings us to the temporal interior of the painting to rethink it through its different stages and renderings. In this work the artist undertakes a lengthening of time—it should be remembered that Picasso created the work in the space of about a month in 1937—in such a way that Picasso's instantaneous mental processes are today dealt with in a sort of slow motion and analyzed, digested and assumed by Amondarain's instantaneous mental processes in a creative loop that leads us to enter an intense atemporal sequence.

A set of representations and reproductions is created; a painting that is photographed and photographs that are today painted in a loop, in two different dimensions: that of the painting included in the image and that of the image itself. Through this practice of appropriationism the creation process is laid bare; the iconic value of the work and its discourse are analyzed to confirm its abiding actuality and to highlight the antifetishist and auric discursive paradoxes raised within the debate that art itself creates about itself and its role in a society like the present.

The exhibition is designed to be shown chronologically, from the initial preliminary sketches to its final presentation. These states are situated in isolation from each other in such a way that the spectator will come upon each of the eight canvases in succession, playing with his temporal and sensory experience, feeling immersed both intellectually and emotionally in the process of executing the work in original size. At the end of the tour is the finished work as we know it today, accompanied by the 8 gouaches reproducing Dora Maar's original photographs using another technique, through a mediation. The experience up to arriving here will be unique to each individual, but in the encounter with the process, over successive layers, the time elapsed, questions and reflections on painting, how it is created, will largely have lifted the veil of multiple signifiers in which history has cloaked the work.

Another major connection between the realization of this project and Picasso's Guernica is the weight of the tumultuous moment in which they are created, decisive moments in history, and the role culture and art play in it. It would not seem excessive to hazard a definition of the current social and economic situation as unsustainable, doomed to change, provoked by a systemic crisis, not without passing through the danger of further radicalization of positions and intransigence—a space where will have to learn to breathe once again.

Tiempo y Urgencia (Guernica) is a project of the ARTIUM Collection.

Time and Urgency (Guernica). José Ramón Amondarain
Opening: 2012 March 30, 8 pm
South Gallery, from 2012 March 30 to September 2
Curator: Daniel Castillejo
A Project by ARTIUM Collection
Produced by ARTIUM (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain)
Suported by: Diputación Foral de Álava, Gobierno Vasco, Euskadi 2012, Ayuntamiento de Vitoria-Gasteiz, El Correo, Inmomym