EMPTINESS AND COLOR IN LÓPEZ-CHÁVEZ
Under the enlightening title of Los espacios del pánico (Estudios superficiales sobre el vacío y el color) (The spaces of panic-Surface studies on emptiness and color), the interesting individual exhibition that the Madrid gallery El Apartamento dedicates to Luis Enrique Lopez-Chavez (Manzanillo, Cuba, 1988) is developed as a thesis scenario for the almost scientific analysis that the Cuban artist has developed around the space of the void and the chromatic.
Approached from a merely formal way, the exposed result turns the canvas into an apparent geometric or volumetric praxis, where color and perspective have their formal appearance, but which, in reality, also encloses a genesis of personal and locative character. Thus, the emptiness explored by López-Chávez seems to arise from the observation of architecture, of constructions subjected to material precariousness or to the passing of time that impact on them totally alien to those who inhabit them.
Precisely, it is that erratic mark of the building where the volume seems to have a fault that leads to understand the different semiotics around the void, those spaces of panic to which the artist alludes in his exhibition and that can be transformed into niches or areas more doomed to death, a concept on which appears the strength of the chromatic language. Thus, Luis Enrique López-Chávez allows himself the apparent incongruity of the tomb in the living room, of an end in life where geometry and color seem to have abandoned their mitigating task to be mere spectators of the erasure of history, personal or ulterior.
The conceptual aspect of the result also seems to bury any hint of a way out of the impact. The forms established on the canvas, brimming with symmetries, depth and perspectives that forcefully claim a certain formal and aesthetic technicality end up creating a pessimistic, almost aseptic, and impersonal pictorial language, although it never ceases to look at the battles between the aesthetic and the graphic or at that local reality with its own aesthetics that becomes a framework concept for these embodied studies.
Los espacios del pánico (Estudios superficiales sobre el vacío y el color) can be seen until February 8 at the Madrid headquarters of El Apartamento, Puebla, 4, Madrid (Spain).