Rufo Criado
20 Jan - 09 Apr 2012
RUFO CRIADO
Sounds of water
20 January - 9 April, 2012
Sala Rekalde presents an exhibition of paintings by Rufo Criado (Aranda de Duero, 1952), an artist of note within the contemporary painting scene today. It shows around 40 works made from 1994 to 2010 structured around the work Sounds of water, which is shown complete for the first time in Bilbao and is comprised of a sequence of ten paintings.
The internalisation of the natural environment has been a constant in the artistic practice of Rufo Criado that has, over time, revealed itself in an increasingly less objective way. If nature is a basic element around which his works have been shaped and built, water, as river and reflection, is the indispensable origin or referent of many of his creations. It is from there that he structures visual sensations, rationalises the perceived and communicates through colour.
As yet another echo from the natural world that inspires Rufo Criado’s plastic exploration, Sounds of water brings together works that have a direct relation with the experience of water, some of them explicitly and others in a more evocative, geometric, abstract fashion. In his words, “water acts as a metaphor of life, of transparency for strange murky times, and as a vindication of a positivism that regards itself through the mirror of daily reality”. Similarly, the works bear a relation with the idea of place, of proximity, since –for Rufo Criado- aesthetic experience is directly linked with the visual and sensorial assimilation of the natural environment of his studio.
Expressive and synthetic, gestural and geometric, sumptuous in colour, Rufo Criado’s pictorial work has gone through developments not only in the construction of the work but also in the assimilation of new materials. He has moved on from two-dimensionality to the threedimensional structure and from orthogonal to circular format, giving rise to pieces that, without losing their pictorial reference, advance toward the object, toward the sculptural.
For a good while now, Rufo Criado, in addition to using acrylic, has incorporated industrial painting, photography and computer-generated painting, always in search of a particular colour quality and in a constant exploration of the limits of pictorial space and of its relation with nature.The employment of metal plate, grilles or wood as a support also stems from his experimentation, pointing to another world, other than nature, connected with urban space, advertising hoardings or signage, in a kind of hybrid between landscape and urban design.
The Ojos de agua (Eyes of water, 2007) series, for instance, are lightboxes in which, with a belt of metal plate, he encircles the print of the organic, represented by a photographically originated woodland scene beneath successive planes of colour. But, at the same time, with these circular compositions it seems as if the painter wished to confess that “the back of the eye” has always been contemplating the landscape. In Días de Otoño. Reflejo no1 (Autumn days. Reflection no 1, 2006) Rufo Criado intelligently resolves the unobstructed nature of the piece and the purposeful hibridisation between an image of synthesis, painting, landscape and urban furniture.
José María Parreño, author of the essay for the exhibition catalogue explains how (...) “his work... allows a reading of abstraction as a synthesis but also as pure art. An interpretation of painting as sign and also as construction. And at the same time, while on the one hand Criado adheres to geometry (in the sense of regulating space), on the other there is an expressive intensity that is sometimes achieved by the brushstroke and on other occasions by the choice of colour”.
www.rufocriado.com
RUFO CRIADO lives and works in his hometown, where he was one of the founding members of A UA CRAG (Artistic Action and Alternative Space Collective, created in 1985), whose activities lasted until 1994 with artistic interventions in different places and exchanges with groups in France, Germany, Holland and Canada.
After that experience of collective artistic self-management, his works began to acquire a more rational objectual component, whilst they were structured through sequential developments. His interest in translating and expressing the sensations of nature and in seeking out a new way of interpreting it also dates back to that time.
In 1994 he started to work with the Galería AELE-Evelyn Botella in Madrid, which represents him today and with which he has held various individual shows, as well as participating in successive editions of international fairs such as ARCO and ART COLOGNE (Cologne, Germany). Also worthy of note are his exhibitions in the Janus Avivson Gallery in London, Paris and New York (1997-1999), and in the Adriana Schmidt Gallery in Stuttgart (Germany) in 1999.
Amongst his last projects, the itinerant exhibition Ojos de agua (Eyes of water) organised by the Cervantes Institute in Palermo, Naples, Warsaw, New Delhi and Tokyo (2007-2009); the retrospective at CAB de Burgos (2010) and Treinta y tres lágrimas de silencio (2011) in the Museo Patio Herreriano of Valladolid, are to be mentioned.
Rufo Criado’s works form part of Museums and Collections such as ARTIUM in Vitoria-Gasteiz, IVAM in Valencia, MUSAC in Leon (Fondo A Ua Crag), Museo Unión Fenosa in La Coruña, the Fine Arts Museum in Santander, the Burgos Museum, Calcografía Nacional in Madrid, Colección Caja de Burgos (Banca Cívica), Fundación Coca-Cola, Colección CajaMadrid, Colección Helga de Alvear and Colección Pilar Citoler.
Sounds of water
20 January - 9 April, 2012
Sala Rekalde presents an exhibition of paintings by Rufo Criado (Aranda de Duero, 1952), an artist of note within the contemporary painting scene today. It shows around 40 works made from 1994 to 2010 structured around the work Sounds of water, which is shown complete for the first time in Bilbao and is comprised of a sequence of ten paintings.
The internalisation of the natural environment has been a constant in the artistic practice of Rufo Criado that has, over time, revealed itself in an increasingly less objective way. If nature is a basic element around which his works have been shaped and built, water, as river and reflection, is the indispensable origin or referent of many of his creations. It is from there that he structures visual sensations, rationalises the perceived and communicates through colour.
As yet another echo from the natural world that inspires Rufo Criado’s plastic exploration, Sounds of water brings together works that have a direct relation with the experience of water, some of them explicitly and others in a more evocative, geometric, abstract fashion. In his words, “water acts as a metaphor of life, of transparency for strange murky times, and as a vindication of a positivism that regards itself through the mirror of daily reality”. Similarly, the works bear a relation with the idea of place, of proximity, since –for Rufo Criado- aesthetic experience is directly linked with the visual and sensorial assimilation of the natural environment of his studio.
Expressive and synthetic, gestural and geometric, sumptuous in colour, Rufo Criado’s pictorial work has gone through developments not only in the construction of the work but also in the assimilation of new materials. He has moved on from two-dimensionality to the threedimensional structure and from orthogonal to circular format, giving rise to pieces that, without losing their pictorial reference, advance toward the object, toward the sculptural.
For a good while now, Rufo Criado, in addition to using acrylic, has incorporated industrial painting, photography and computer-generated painting, always in search of a particular colour quality and in a constant exploration of the limits of pictorial space and of its relation with nature.The employment of metal plate, grilles or wood as a support also stems from his experimentation, pointing to another world, other than nature, connected with urban space, advertising hoardings or signage, in a kind of hybrid between landscape and urban design.
The Ojos de agua (Eyes of water, 2007) series, for instance, are lightboxes in which, with a belt of metal plate, he encircles the print of the organic, represented by a photographically originated woodland scene beneath successive planes of colour. But, at the same time, with these circular compositions it seems as if the painter wished to confess that “the back of the eye” has always been contemplating the landscape. In Días de Otoño. Reflejo no1 (Autumn days. Reflection no 1, 2006) Rufo Criado intelligently resolves the unobstructed nature of the piece and the purposeful hibridisation between an image of synthesis, painting, landscape and urban furniture.
José María Parreño, author of the essay for the exhibition catalogue explains how (...) “his work... allows a reading of abstraction as a synthesis but also as pure art. An interpretation of painting as sign and also as construction. And at the same time, while on the one hand Criado adheres to geometry (in the sense of regulating space), on the other there is an expressive intensity that is sometimes achieved by the brushstroke and on other occasions by the choice of colour”.
www.rufocriado.com
RUFO CRIADO lives and works in his hometown, where he was one of the founding members of A UA CRAG (Artistic Action and Alternative Space Collective, created in 1985), whose activities lasted until 1994 with artistic interventions in different places and exchanges with groups in France, Germany, Holland and Canada.
After that experience of collective artistic self-management, his works began to acquire a more rational objectual component, whilst they were structured through sequential developments. His interest in translating and expressing the sensations of nature and in seeking out a new way of interpreting it also dates back to that time.
In 1994 he started to work with the Galería AELE-Evelyn Botella in Madrid, which represents him today and with which he has held various individual shows, as well as participating in successive editions of international fairs such as ARCO and ART COLOGNE (Cologne, Germany). Also worthy of note are his exhibitions in the Janus Avivson Gallery in London, Paris and New York (1997-1999), and in the Adriana Schmidt Gallery in Stuttgart (Germany) in 1999.
Amongst his last projects, the itinerant exhibition Ojos de agua (Eyes of water) organised by the Cervantes Institute in Palermo, Naples, Warsaw, New Delhi and Tokyo (2007-2009); the retrospective at CAB de Burgos (2010) and Treinta y tres lágrimas de silencio (2011) in the Museo Patio Herreriano of Valladolid, are to be mentioned.
Rufo Criado’s works form part of Museums and Collections such as ARTIUM in Vitoria-Gasteiz, IVAM in Valencia, MUSAC in Leon (Fondo A Ua Crag), Museo Unión Fenosa in La Coruña, the Fine Arts Museum in Santander, the Burgos Museum, Calcografía Nacional in Madrid, Colección Caja de Burgos (Banca Cívica), Fundación Coca-Cola, Colección CajaMadrid, Colección Helga de Alvear and Colección Pilar Citoler.