Predators
Emilio Corti
Hyperrealism, so popular in its recent gruesome version, is a broad attitude, a big trend that traces back to the beginning of the 20th Century. We must not forget that Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnèe laid the basis. The pornographic, highly detailed representation of the naked woman with her legs wide-open revealed a new dimension of art. After his refined poison distilled in the Dada years, Duchamp cast the conceptual medium for an effective representation of our present carnal and spiritual experiences. In the 60s many followed his path and Bruce Nauman’s From Hand to Mouth introduced the actual features of classic Hyperrealism, exasperated care for details reached by directly casting his wife’s arm and the figure-disrupting cut of the sculpture, that reveals a morbid vision of the human and his life.
Josè Molina is a Spanish artist now living in Milan, Italy. His paintings and drawings are executed with an astonishing skill that makes every hyperrealistic work that I have seen look average. They challenge photography and its pretence to capture reality. Yet they are everything but realistic. His research has a root in anthropology and communication techniques. He has developed his vision of mankind through observing a wide range of behaviours, from the relational dynamics between employees in advertising corporations to the lives of the quechua, native populations in Ecuador in Amazonas and Chimborazo. Thus he has developed a philosophy and a poetic vision that concretizes in his artwork.
The prominence of the great Spanish painting tradition is elaborated with regard to the highest goal of contemporary photography. Molina’s works reach what photography could not reach, in the baroque infinite mutations of the matter and the sign. Yet they mix a pictorial and photographic view with great taste and beauty. Portraits of beings, which are partly human and partly something else, populate his visions. The mutation generates different kinds of figures that represent a variety of behaviours and aspects of life. They are a work of fantasy, but they clearly reveal some human types we meet everyday.
There is a whole hierarchy of individuals, caught in their belief systems and attitudes, with no trace of judgment imposed, and with a bitter philosophical vision that makes them even more touching.
He shows real skill in transforming invisible things that inhabit our life into images and brilliantly making them real. A whole personality–with fears, desires, goals and beliefs–is rendered through his work, often a figure in a landscape. We leave the exhibition with a sense of satisfaction and mercy and this is the greatest quality of Molina’s work, his wisdom to give us something constructive, in a very deep sense. These values will become more and more appreciated, very soon.
The paintings are framed in actual sculptures made by Pippo Basile, a famous sculptor and framemaker in Milan. These objects hold a dialogue with Molina’s drawings and become their extension.
Texts are written, travelling along with the show, creating paths of affinity and divergence from the images which allow deeper analysis and further imagery, always walking in the immaterial field of perception and feeling, yet always with a sharp view of our surroundings. Seemingly unimportant details of our lives are revelatory of behaviours and beliefs, but always with the grace that makes this art alive, like nature.
