Luis Coquenão

The painting of Louis Coquenão shares many things with the cinema of Tarkovski. The viewer has to let go of the image, dissolved in it, fall in it, like someone who is lost in the depths of a haiku. This is to squeeze out the most of the poetics of the image as an observation and the ability to move or bring the different scales. Is the image as a field abismado, as a revelation impossible. They are places where work absence, images that embrace the sense of loss. There is No way to access the mystery, as any form of approach does mean a move away.

Luis Coquenão understands painting as an act of time, extremely weak. The picture unfolds in its own time and for the spectator, no image is captured at the first look. Plays itself with the margins of the vision and the fragments, with disorders, until you reach an interesting state of ‘suspension’. I think, for example, in how these works could be compared with the narratives of Maurice Blanchot, desorientándonos in its variability because they contain a another time, not fictitious, but the narrative, pictorial, or if you prefer the experience of the conformation of a few of the ways toward the unknown. Because the time here is experienced. In Blanchot is the time of the unheard and the unthinkable, from the dark, or, more specifically, of the absence of time or present without presence. As in the forms of appearance fractal Luis Coquenão, everything overflows, until the actual margin, and the artist is tattooing that reality by insisting on the fragment of poetry, by adding another time, virtual, imaginary as the time of writing, aporético as inherent to the writing of Blanchot, unable to turn this definitely.

Little or nothing seems to have to see these landscapes in recent with the figures Luis Coquenão presented at the beginning of the TWENTY-first century. But a closer look will warn a trend the elusive, at a distance blurred, then projected from boxes that looked like to be a photo taken at hidden, thus gaining an unquestionable uncertainty, avoiding the concrete, without revealing the space of the action. Ever since Luis Coquenão worked fragmented stories, as he does not want us to have anything for us to be ourselves, as the spectators, who provide a sense of what is seen. First from female figures, of a fragile aspect, which is reinforced with the ascetic and aseptic their scenarios, as well emphasize the prominence of their figures. Now the mystery continues, but takes it to the landscape, to the inexpressible nature of a painting more zen.

I understand that it is now when Luis Coquenão has achieved a fullness of painting, a sense of the personal, a-line firm. Bluntly, I would say that it is now more a painter. It all has to do with how it takes ink. It is precisely that maturity which allows you to be more spontaneous. The nature is now coming to an exercise wipe and sweep, something very technical, but at the same time very personal. Is the space as absence sheer able to allow all of the presences, as that nothing creative that speaks to Maria Zambrano, where the creative personality cute with the non-being.

In the background, Luis Coquenão operates as a sculptor. The artist removed the paint. I think of Giacometti and how the erosion of the space looks like go eat away at the figures. In a way, the landscapes of Coquenão also consume, erode to become definitive, precisely when the vacuum becomes an active entity. What paints, indeed, is the distance, which is given to us as a vision shifting, that sometimes leaks and other leaks out, but in any case, always be abisma. Hence the appropriateness of the title: landscapes of ink.

Having a conversation with the artist in the studio, assail us several names of filosófos, as Adorno and his aesthetic theory. Luis Coquenão, he studied philosophy and on them their jobs to me raised even more questions. More and more, in their paintings, emerges a sort of balance hypnotic, a process of energy where the vacuum is the subject and the image, a path, a journey. I think then in Georges Didi-Huberman, who notes that “the modality of the visible becomes inevitable -that is to say, condemned to a question of be - when seeing is the feeling that something escapes us ineluctably: in other words, when you see it is to lose.” Because in this game spaces intesrticiales any approach does mean a move away. And that feeling is extrapolated to their sequences, which give color and movement to a type of paintings that at the same time can refer to the diffuse landscapes of James McNeill Whistler, except for the artificiality of their colors: red, green, blue, yellow... Not in vain, Luis Coquenão is aware of the work of artists like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, who looked more or less attentive will end that are inserted into the oriígenes of romantic painting of a landscape. In the end, the term "Color field"refers to the spatiality of the color that's almost always expand to the edges and tend to the monochrome. Luis Coquenão could be a good abstract painter, but a painter decidedly figurative, able to immerse ourselves at the same time in a pictorial space sublimated.

I think the relationship that artist, Herbert Brandl, set with the image of the mountain, very close to that of the poet romantic. As Robert Walser in the literary, Brandl face painting as a journey, as auscultation and search for the light. From images that come from mountaineering guides, works as an evocation, in which the referent original remanece as mild memory on the canvas. The ambiguous position of her work makes many of their pieces are considered figurative, even though those works we refer to an abstraction product of its dissolution in color. In a certain way, one could speak of control and lack of control because it scans the surface, the density, the volume, and, in short, a process that is understood as a reaction to a interactive permanent; in the first space, then ink, then the spatiality of the surface... Brandl wondered when we have the control over a box, and he confesses that his interest is focused on to be able to be in front of him, that he goes around, it will wrap. It claimed so the gestural and the surprise that accompanies the characteristics of the ink, and its fluidity. All of this is not far from how appropriate Luis Coquenão, which explores something as well as a few water marks that trigger the disorder of the concrete.

Luis Coquenão know that nature has an aspect that is invisible and intangible, beyond the direct experience of the senses. Pointed out by Wucius Wong The Tao in a text by the artist, highlights and understood in relation to their work. Indeed, as is the case with the protagonists of the film Tarkovski, before his works of the world slips by our side, without edges fixed, where all are banks stamped by fog, which prevents the passage of the look, the transition between fluid spaces, between landscapes of ink. Because in Luis Coquenão, landscape, still open, is impenetrable, inaccessible. As in romanticism, imagination is the only intermediary. Noted by Edmund Burke: “In the nature images, dark, confusing and uncertain have a greater power to stir the imagination great passions than those that are clear and limpid”. But if you something are talking about is a kind of dispossession, of a split between what is, what the artist lets us see and what we see. The image is carried to an extreme, to a place where the picture is trying to advertise. As when a viewer enters into a work of James Turrell, something that so accurately describes Didi-Huberman: "a span of distance, the man that watch is unable to feel that he has seen all that has looked at, still less of a feel of what you know."