Light in the darkness

I’m not sure how Ochoa chooses the films he watches, but it’s clear that he’s looking for something different from the deafening emptiness we’re usually offered. His black and white landscapes are reminiscent of the auteur film series, those small screening rooms where directors like Angelopoulos, Wenders or Tarkovski astonished us with images of such unique beauty. The ambient darkness helped us to immerse ourselves in these desolate, beautiful landscapes, paradoxically bright and dark at the same time.

The works presented here evoke similar sensations. On the one hand, through a succession of small pieces on polyester paper – one of his most common supports – which, in their longitudinal arrangement, inevitably suggest the reading of a succession of celluloid frames, a storyboard impossible in its narrative heterogeneity. . On the other hand, there are the larger canvases, which show a classic duality: a nature of unfathomable dimensions and architecture or figures that indicate human presence and action. It is these latter elements that, learning from the masters of the past, from Rembrandt or Ribera to Richter, add motifs from a long tradition: boats in the sand, a lighthouse, hands, fire, physical combat as a sign of inner struggle…

In this way, Ochoa invites the viewer to extract the most profound message from the works, but also, if he wishes, to introduce and resignify others from his personal career. Some titles lead us to very specific references, while others remain much more open, in a voluntary indeterminacy. “Although it is night” refers, of course, to San Juan de la Cruz, but also to Enrique Morente or Rosalía; and in front of his works we also find Evelyn Waugh, Caspar David Friedrich, the Book of Psalms or the Coen brothers. In Ochoa’s case, his personal vision of prayer is the inspiration for this project, which heralds a new stage in his work: a new stage in which change counts as much as continuity.

In this way, the artist’s journey towards a deepening of the substance of his work is evident. He is moving from the observation of the grandeur of nature to the search for transcendence, a path that was already implicit in his previous work, but which is now more accessible to those who wish to travel it, and to the extent that they wish to do so. He still invites us to look carefully, to stop time in front of the images; even if they have cinematographic origins, let us forget their fleeting original state and look at them as traces of something great and lasting, or, if we wish, of someone. We will not be far wrong, in Ochoa’s case as in that of other contemporary artists who want to talk about God through their art, as James Elkins has already pointed out years ago in his pioneering book “On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art” (Routledge, 2004). (Routledge, 2004).

Finally, and since the formal is not at odds with the conceptual, it is not idle to consider how the material and technical neatness of his works is key to the meditative wonder they inspire in us. A few walkers carrying lamps at night, next to the black silhouette of a temple, silhouetted against the firmament without luminaries; a symphony in black, an almost velvety blue darkness; shapes constructed by imperceptible layers of pigment, polished to a surface so smooth that it seems photographic; our senses stop, suspended before a landscape as plausible as it is dreamlike, in which painting once again achieves the miracle of making the spiritual material. I predict that Ochoa has a lot more to push us to look outwards and inwards.

Jorge Sebastian Lozano

University of Valencia / Mainel Foundation