Xosé Luís Otero. Atlas of solitude
Renovator of a landscape constructed from memories, fragments and dregs of an enormous emotional toll and expressive force; this devastated natural work, the deserted city as a reflection of the individual’s solitude.
A redrawn, restructured, modified and denatured landscape, a process that manages to convert it into this same basic concept, into a mental construction. A lifeless landscape, unshaken by the passage of time, Otero has paradoxically erected a solid image of destruction, an authentic Atlas of solitude.
The Devouring Man
For Otero, antisocial and destructive behaviour is masculine. It is the Devouring Man, Mother Earth’s ancestral predator, the savage rapist of the maternal uterus, the explosion of amniotic fluid, the unscathed and victorious atavistic legacy.
An act of uncontrollable manly strength that shares its origin with humanity and moves forward with it. A devastating colonization of the planet that makes a victim of this most widespread crime, leaving all of those who have committed it unpunished and tolerated.
So a life sentence or the death penalty. This does not matter. Well, what is the prisoner, the human being, if not an eternal being sentenced to death? A human imbalance which will inevitably reach its unrepentant conquest, which is none other than its own extinction.
The inherited landscape and the new landscape
One. We are the heirs of the venom that dyes the rivers that die before reaching the sea. The ashes that now threaten to overflow these vast caskets that used to be abundant woodland. Broken figures in the steamy landscape. Decay, disorder, chaos. A magnitude of abandoned structures.
Two. A threshold for transit, a gateway and a means of communication.
Three. The conquest of a three-dimensionality that strengthens its path, encouraging a journey of exploration, and rendering mere observation impossible.
And four. These are the new landscapes, constructed from their own destruction. Circumscribed curves in an infinite place, in absolute space. Interior landscapes that are a way of sublimating this painful contemplation, this aesthetic experience.
Sanctum sanctorum
An artist’s studio is their most sacred place, their privately owned reserve, the place where all that has been gathered from outside sprouts, a cavern where artists bear witness to their own miracle.
High and narrow windows zealously watching over the eremite’s enclosure, the eremite is buried in this cell where isolation erases any notion of space and time. And a melody that only he can hear. Attentive to the strong beating of his heart which is crying out to leave or to abandon this ridiculous thoracic cage once again. IT is out there, but yet it is more inside than ever, this Everything, this absolute Nothingness, this delicate sublimation and wild instinct, the maternal caress and the mundane impact.
Poetry, music and intimate reflection, the three sole companions on this journey to creative development, within its supreme process of investigation. A studio, a place to store material elements, objects and textures; but also, and in particular, a place to store the intangible, the ideas and concepts which come to the artist on a daily basis. Sources of inspiration. Instruments for this process that can give an initial project form and convert it into the final piece of work.
The Aleph or the illusion of time and space
The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the sacred language, is the aleph or alef, which is the only letter pronounced by God in Sinai. The symbolic and evocative title of a tale, seventeen, which would later lend its name to the book published in 1949. Nonetheless, it would only be within Borge’s universe that our reference would make sense. There, in the corner of the basement of an old house in Buenos Aires on Garay Street, Borges would discover “one of the points in space which contains all points”, “the place where all places are seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending”.
Because this is how Otero’s refinement of his initial landscapes is defined, those enclosed places and moments, which did without a doubt exist, but which aspired to the absolute, to the idea, to the concept, to everything. According to Borges in his Aleph: “In that single, gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them amazed me more than the fact that all of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous…”.
From the countryside to the city
The rural exodus, the traumatic experience the artist suffered during childhood will impregnate his landscapes with a dramatism of a consubstantial nature. Two universes, two realities as close as they are far, equidistant from this individual condemned to isolation, to the inherent solitude of the sole.
A familiar atmosphere, well, this atmosphere that he managed to recreate in his studio, this place that is both neutral land and a battlefield, a space in which neonates and the terminally ill coexist.
Physical exile through metastasis, torn regret from what has been lost and is irretrievable. Despair. Exiled emotions that now feel this old chill once more. A mirage with nightmarish glints, now present inside an urban perimeter as well. The oxidized skeleton. The silent and grim uninhabited hive.
Rubén Martínez Alonso
Exhibition curator
