“The project that Bosco Caride presents at the MARCO in Vigo heralds a change of direction with regard to his early works and, at the same time, the culmination of certain interests that have illuminated his entire career. This is an oeuvre based on nuances of colour, but which also articulates a profound content, that may be understood as a meditative space, something that interlinks to a whole contemporary tradition running from Romanticism to Mark Rothko’s monochrome pieces.

From the very onset, Bosco Caride’s work has been able to reconcile dualities and opposites in a fruitful synthesis. The history of art has habitually treated these binomials, photography/painting, form/content, beauty/terror, representation/abstraction, as incompatible or conflicting...

Photography/painting

In the series produced in the first decade of 2000, "Paisajes construidos" [Constructed landscapes] and "Recuerdos de mi ciudad" [Souvenirs of my city], Bosco Caride worked on landscapes and urban features based on photographs using oil paints, watercolours and graphite pencils. They were residual and dehumanized visions, riddled with anxiety, similar stylistically to the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. At the time, they were categorized, somewhat precipitously, as Pop or Hyper-realism. However, the real interest of this suite revolved around the way in which the artist had transformed photography into painting.

With regard to the work that concerns us now, "Indicios" [Signs], the procedure has been the opposite: one might almost say that the painting has been transformed into photography thanks to his mastery of the airbrush. In effect, this tool, in combination with the use of photographic paper and aluminium as canvases, brings an intentional ambiguity between photographic and painted images.

The sinister side of beauty

Bosco Caride seeks artistic beauty. He is a painter who applies great effort and care to form and who understands art as a utopian place. However, in his works there is also a disturbing side peeking out from the back of the painting. Beauty and disaster are fused together in his work because since Romanticism the condition of modern beauty is darkness. A veiled horror, hidden under the layers of paint that enshroud his landscapes.  Bosco Caride’s playing with glazes and transparencies allows one to sense a darker side that is never explicitly alluded to, but which is there, constantly present. An unease that also becomes apparent, though in a different way, in the disquieting urban landscapes mentioned earlier.

Representation/abstraction

Are clouds abstract? Is smoke? The impressionists, concerned about directly conveying the visual experience, focussed especially on these kinds of transient and intangible motifs, such as reflections on water, air moisture, light reflection on surfaces... 

Bosco Caride’s paintings revisit this matter: are his cloud or smoke paintings –without spatial reference, physical motifs or horizons– depictions of natural phenomena? Or, to the contrary, are they abstract forms? The audacity of Bosco Caride is that he keeps up this interplay of mimesis and abstraction, something that appears in some of his art from other periods, as was the case of “Refugios” [Shelters] (2008), in which he constantly employed modular structures and grid-like façades as though they were paintings by Mondrian.”

                                                                                             Jaume Vidal Oliveras, curator of the exhibition

Hisotrian and art critic Jaume Vidal Oliveras works as a professor at Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, and regular collaborator as art critic for El Cultural, among other releases.