Francisco Ugarte – Amarillo casi rojo casi azul

Mostra personale.

Comunicato stampa

Amarillo casi rojo, casi azul” (Yellow almost red, almost blue) is the first solo show at LOOM gallery by Mexican artist Francisco Ugarte (Guadalajara, 1973). Francisco Ugarte’s practice focuses on the exploration of minimal elements in representation such as line, geometric forms, primary colours, the materiality of metal or concrete, as well as the consideration of the act of drawing as a subjective expression that can be meditative or performative.

Ugarte constantly highlights the elements offered by the context itself in order to intensify our perception, activate landscapes, or empathize a natural or architectural phenomenon. Through a coherent economy of resources and conceptual techniques, the artist has developed a personal language and a catalog of distinctive forms that evoke architectural codes, oriental philosophy, abstraction and different processual approaches to painting. In recent years, his work has evolved towards the exploration of drawing and painting as a conceptual tool and performative act. For this exhibition, the artist has prepared a new series of colour gradient paintings, as well as metal sculptures that dialogue with the gallery space and recall the most elemental drawing.

His chromatic compositions consider the act of painting from a mindful aspect in which the artist pours all his subjectivity of the present moment. Following his work methodology inherited from an architectural approach, the artist starts from a defined number of resources to explore how these can relate in a specific environment, seeking to apprehend the essence of each material he uses.

For this series of paintings, the artist has arranged different brushes to make gradients of yellow-red, blue-yellow, and black-white. The artist achieves different colours such as orange, green and grey, becoming less of a chromatic quest and more the result of a process. In this single action, Ugarte explores some fundamentals of classical color theory. The artist generates another series of works with the remnant and the same brushes used for the gradients. In a spirit of resourcefulness, he cleans the used brushes directly of a new canvas, to finally circulate them with their primary color partner. This action again illustrates the artist’s working method, where the process or the tools often become the piece itself.
Francisco Ugarte_paint
Francisco Ugarte (1973 in Guadalajara, México) is a Mexican artist and architect. His multidisciplinary, abstract and minimalist work can be understood as a series of material and architectural explorations generated at the crossroads between experience and perception. Through the use of different media such as site-specific interventions, sculpture, drawing, video, painting and installation, his gestures subtly lead to a deep attention to the environment and draw attention to the materiality of the elements he uses. Presence, perception, action, intuition, light, time, change, place, the material and the universal are recurrent themes in his work.