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José Díaz at The Goma

August 26, 2021

Artist: José Díaz

Exhibition title: Constricto

Venue: The Goma, Madrid, Spain

Date: March 4 – July 10, 2019

Photography: Roberto Ruíz / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Goma, Madrid

Constricto, like a conflation of constrain and construct, exhibits a number of paintings that speak to the architecture of form and the creation of meaning. Starting out from an open and improvised language based on action and reaction, José Díaz throws his painting into disarray: forcing, limiting, twisting and erasing it in such a way that he denies us information that converges in a highly particular way on its limits.

In his works one can observe how, when applied in sweeping movements, the blotches of paint regroup, demarcated where the brush is lifted from the canvas; the colours mix and the stroke vanishes, discontinuing the original sense of the brushwork. This painterly becoming obscures the sign and transforms the ground into figure. Figures that become a barely recognizable body or a monstrous system. In the case of Constrictor, the figure is reduced to an osseous structure, a skeleton, and new signifiers come into being through its faults. These radical modifications are equally patent in Antiayer, where the artist breaks down and iconoclastically manipulates what happens in the painting the day before yesterday of the title. In this way, Díaz interrupts the logical goal, thus problematizing the very material and purpose always presented in painting.

The paintings on view allude to anti-ergonomics, mutilation and stretching to fit an end goal. The motifs bring to mind the myth of Procrustes, the cyclopean vision of many words as a metaphor of two-dimensionality or reflections through a glass brick. In a series of small-format works, retinal impressions are taken as a painterly motif through the phosphenes and blotches that appear when our eyes are closed tight.

Against the backdrop of the current situation José Díaz invites us to reflect on what is missing, what is surplus and how to adapt to this context.

José Díaz (Madrid, 1981) has a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid. His work has been seen in recent years in numerous institutional projects such as La cuestión es ir tirando, Spanish Cultural Center in Mexico City, 2020; Querer parecer noche, Ca2m, Mósteles, 2018; Generaciones, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2018 or Promotora, Center Cívic Can Felipa, Barcelona, 2017. In 2019 he had a duo exhibition at Patio Herreriano Museum with Ángeles Marco and he will also be part of Pintura: renovación permanente curated by Mariano Navarro that will open soon in the same museum. In 2020 he wins the Arco Comunidad de Madrid Prize for young artists.