José Luis Martinez Meseguer, commissioner, critic and cultural manager, among others of its many facets, has made the commissioning of the two parallel exhibitions, promoted by the Fuentes Vicente Foundation, in the Casino of Orihuela, Alicante (Amnios) and in the Palacete Of the Silk, Murcia (21st Century Retablos), and that have taken place in the months of December of 2013 to January of 2014.
A speech for a curator:
Alicante, December 2013
Estartús is 64 years old and has 45 years of artistic practice. With each new series opens and closes a style, none is similar to the previous one.
It moves comfortable in large formats and in abstraction, insofar as it eliminates figuration or realistic representation. The surface of the painting is an all over or unlimited open field, except for its own dimensions. It does not establish any hierarchy. Its center of interest is the gesture or movement of painting. There is no common style in abstraction, if not so many as practitioners, except in the rejection of drawing and control, of the traditional conception of painting and of representing reality in an objective way.
As for language, it creates open works that the viewer reads freely. The artist makes signs that give a sense, we could even speak of calligraphic abstraction, but also alternates and uses the Latin alphabet. Performs an automatic, direct subconscious writing action. The artist manufactures signs to which he gives a universal proper sense of the interiority and deconstruction of the idea, private which can not be understood by any other than by himself.
Among the characteristics of his painting, we find: balance in the composition; Is a material painting, with an expressive use of matter, to which it applies destruction (perforations, cuts, scratches) and automatism; The expression of the artist’s pictorial emotion (individual, immediate); spontaneity. It works from the absence of preconceived ideas, the experience of the fact gives rise to the idea. The work is the place and the privileged moment in which the artist discovers
RETELS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
Retablo is a set or collection of painted or carved figures, which represent in series a history or event (DRAE).
Series produced in 2010 and composed of 40 works in large format, on wooden supports, salvaged from construction, in which mechanical and pictorial intervention takes place. A trend, that of recycling, which adheres to one of the lines of contemporary art, to contemporary artistic practice. To point out a vital concomitance in this series, because Estartús is, besides a degree in Fine Arts, architect. And they have a lot of construction, of constructive, of architectural this series.
Retablos directed towards the spiritual slope of our being. The stories that are narrated belong to our century and are secular, not going to be destined to be placed behind the altar. They tell us face to face, with a lot of closeness, elements that least concern the author.
Use in this series the technique of action painting. Pictorial technique – and name of the pictorial movement that uses it – which through color and matter tries to express sensations such as energy, speed, movement. From the technical point of view, it consists in splashing the surface of the canvas with paint spontaneously and energetically, that is to say without preset scheme, becoming a space of action and not in the mere reproduction of reality.
From the Greek amnion (άμνίον), membrane, is a term of the zoology and the biology: Closed sack that surrounds and protects the embryo of the reptiles, birds and mammals and that forms like extraembrionaria membrane, filled with an aqueous liquid: the liquid Amniotic or amniotic water (DRAE).
Pictorial series of 2013 composed of 70 pieces, 40 small and medium format, on canvas, 30 on parchment.
