CURRENT EXHIBITION
I have to admit that the fact that for half a century I have devoted a considerable part of my academic work at university – teaching and research, philosophical and historical – to the study and monitoring of artistic work, especially that developed in the Valencian context, has allowed me, as an art critic and regular active member of numerous juries, to discover, in a gradual and sequential way, the emergence of certain assets, unique promises and personal values related to the visual arts, in some cases directly, in the quarry itself, or under other circumstances incorporated into it, the emergence of certain assets, singular promises and personal values linked to the fine arts, during this long journey, whether in some cases directly from the quarry itself, or in other circumstances – from other plural geographical panoramas, for different reasons – incorporated into the available offer of university training centres in the Valencian context.
Undoubtedly, with the aforementioned introductory justification, I wanted to point out/suggest one of the cases that, for me, is the most unique and outstanding in this process of constant self-learning and critical unveiling that I have been experiencing for decades. It is – to be honest – the conscious contact, in successive cyclical stages, both with the pictorial works of José Antonio Ochoa and with his reflective, open and committed personality. Although, as I have said, it has always been through the encounter with their proposals, in that decisive game of comparison that begins with the required selection, in a competition, continues through the obligatory discussion of estimates, in common, and ends with the relevant collegial decision, with a view to the official awards/recognitions granted.
If I have to exercise a kind of compilation memory in this case, I will say first of all that it was above all the obvious interdisciplinarity that underpinned her work that first caught my attention. From the beginning of this adventure – perhaps a decade ago, more or less – I came across a sustained dialogue, in each of its pictorial options, between photography, film and painting, although, incidentally, the order of this transdisciplinary crossing – which became the key to its restless/disturbing “poetics” – could mutate strategically, making painting the finalist and definitive receptacle of the chain of experiences, after the previous obligatory presence of photography, always and everywhere, also genetically inscribed, in the obligatory cinematic action. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it was the pictorial filter, regulative, incorporated in the retina, as a regulative objective (in its double sense), that required the selective personal contribution of a visual phenomenology, historically born from the film universe and its parallels. photographic resources.
Not for nothing – I will continue to be honest – my visual preferences, of cinematographic origin (my doctoral thesis was in the field of film semiotics, presented at the UVEG, in the academic year 1969-70), were precisely those that later, in favour of the growing study and observation of the plastic arts, mutated again and again in my definitive teaching dedication to the cultivation of aesthetics and the theory of art. Soon I was able to easily recognise his paintings among the series of projects presented in the various calls.
If I have to exercise a kind of compilation memory in this case, I will say first of all that it was above all the obvious interdisciplinarity that underpinned his work that first caught my attention. From the beginning of this adventure – perhaps a decade ago, more or less – I came across a sustained dialogue, in each of its pictorial options, between photography, film and painting, although, incidentally, the order of this transdisciplinary crossing – which became the key to its restless/disturbing “poetics” – could mutate strategically, making painting the finalist and definitive receptacle of the chain of experiences, after the previous obligatory presence of photography, always and everywhere, also genetically inscribed, in the obligatory cinematic action. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it was the pictorial filter, regulative, incorporated in the retina, as a regulative objective (in its double sense), that required the selective personal contribution of a visual phenomenology, historically born from the film universe and its parallels. photographic resources.
Not for nothing – I will continue to be honest – my visual preferences, of cinematographic origin (my doctoral thesis was in the field of film semiotics, presented at the UVEG, in the academic year 1969-70), were precisely those that later, in favour of the growing study and observation of the plastic arts, mutated again and again in my definitive teaching dedication to the cultivation of aesthetics and the theory of art. Soon I was able to easily recognise his paintings among the series of projects presented in the various calls. It was clear to me, from the solid link that became apparent to me in the consolidated development of their proposals, between the theoretical dimension (reflective and prior) of their work and the rigorous practical aspect (the care given to the technical resources used and subjected to constant experience). pictorial works, that this “poetics” – sum of regulatory concept, adapted programme and postulated ideal – even if it was only for the moment, still the first sketch of a praiseworthy and hopeful future, contained within itself the necessary, demanding keys and required, of a promising itinerary.
The truth is that, throughout the decade, I have not ceased to follow from afar the gradual steps of his precise process, always attracted by the unique way in which cinema becomes the lever – playful or agonising, expressive or narrative, as the case may be – of its determining plastic resources. What’s more, when the visual language developed, fluidly, with constructive solidity, it was because – I’ll say it in obligatory summary – the corresponding essential aesthetic categories, woven from the perspective, had already been defined/refined. / In the end, it was the cinephile’s perceptive resources and the daily use of photographic strategies – always as a personal vademecum – between knowing how to see and attentive observation, that arbitrated both the content, structures, themes and forms required, in the resulting complex pictorial narrative.
It is here, for example, that their fundamental current tendency towards the category of the sublime is born, anchored in interpreted nature, in the landscape and/or in the infinity of romantic dreams, which continue to accumulate symbolic attractions. and literary links with the history of images. In fact, there are no images without the chained context of other previous images, whether with their history, with their interdisciplinary links, or with the almost inexhaustible conditions that the spectator’s gaze takes away from, contributes to, combines and multiplies, within the various combinable visual/plastic/literary universes, in solid recurrence.
From all this I would like to deduce that J. A. Ochoa’s painting, in its contrasting complexity, ends up, with obvious effort on his part, appearing even simple within the range of its transdisciplinary resources, at the same time, curiously – and here is the effective Gordian knot of its secret adventure – the work itself perhaps adapts to the gaze that observes it, It waits, according to its possible hermeneutic responses, to move on, diligently, to project/release more and more cables, according to each case, on the respective viewer, who is in fact the one who regulates, in his or her hands, the action of the perceptual, imaginary, reflective and interpretive tangle of images. In fact, he knows how to delegate interests and engage the gaze of others – in front of his works – because he himself has previously embodied this interdisciplinary investigative and constructive role, camera at the ready, travelling through the planes of everyday civic life, as well as museum spaces or film screening rooms, before and after painting, as repeated exercises in applied reflection, directly in his work, irremediably infecting us with his obsessions.
Today, perhaps, it is a matter of putting painting at the service of the clouds, while yesterday, works could travel through certain landscapes or secretly spell out the expressions of faces. What difference does it make? In the end, the effective formula is the same, in its eternal, creative and tireless adaptability. Ut kinesis pictura…
Painting at the Service of the Clouds is about the influence of the iconography of the painter Caspar David Friedrich on cinema. It follows in the footsteps of the artist’s previous projects: Ut Pictura Kinesis, Sustained Time or Mirar el Tiempo, the work that J.A. Ochoa presents in this exhibition deals with two main themes: on the one hand, the relationship that exists between cinema and painting, focusing mainly on a cinematographic landscape with pictorial allusions, and on the other, the attempt to evoke, through painting, the Romantic concept of the sublime and to update its meaning in our times. The title of the exhibition comes from the Victorian critic John Ruskin, who, in his book Modern Painters, wrote about the modern landscape, referring to the Romantic painters, especially Turner: “If a general and characteristic name were needed for modern landscape art, no better one could be invented than At the Service of the Clouds”.
The exhibition focuses exclusively on the figure of the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich, and the presence of his iconography has influenced the seventh art. The starting point of the exhibition is the artist’s encounter with two cinematographic images alluding to two of Friedrich’s works in Room 3.06 of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin: Monk by the Sea and Abbey in the Oak Grove. The artist’s interest, more than in his own works, is in their presence in the cinema, which he takes as a reference to create his own version of them, thus seeking that round trip: from painting to cinema and from cinema to painting. After the accidental meeting that gave rise to the exhibition, the artist carried out a documentary work in which he collected cinematographic images with echoes of Friedrich, which served as a reference for his pictorial creation. To emphasise this relationship, the paintings have the same titles as those by Friedrich to which they refer. However, we are faced with works that have their own personality, which, despite their romantic reminiscences, challenge us with great relevance.
Román de la Calle