VERSUS No.3

AGUSTÍN GONZÁLEZ & ROBERTO TURNBULL

PROJECTS ROOM

November 02- 21, 2020

THREE CUSHION SHOOTING: TURNBULL VERSUS GONZÁLEZ CHRISTIAN BARRAGAN Painting has always been a confrontation. Saying that painting is the meeting place between the look and what is looked at escapes any assumption, since it emphatically points to a primitive state of creative work: before the empty space of the frame or the page, painters and poets have testified alike, face to face. face to face, the abyss that separates them from what they say, the white silence that both retains and sustains their work. Faced with such concern, the will to go there persists, to another place that the word or the stroke try to decipher. To say that painting is the meeting place between the eye and the hand, which is as much as affirming that it is the propitious occasion in which the being debates between intuition and reason or, if preferred, between an unaltered order and an enlivening chaos, does not evade or forget any understood; on the contrary, it is a direct launch against the pineapple of our conventions and certainties. Arranged on the green cloth in a game of pool, the painter sharpens his vision and begins his attack (against the past that precedes him and, essentially, facing the memory of himself) by drawing a horizon, a long line that extends beyond that duration; the poet, for his part, attacks his affront with a high vertical note. The first shot has been launched, but not against the target of some target, but against the cue ball on a table open to innumerable possibilities; The confrontation has given way to a game in which the painter and the poet are at the same time the front and back of the same player: the ally and the adversary to meet the unknown, although in battle with himself.

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It was exactly seven years ago, during the winter of 2013, when Roberto Turnbull (1959) and Agustín Gonzaléz (1978) presented a joint painting exhibition for the first time, it happened on the defunct independent platform DIAGRAMA, then under the management of the also painters Javier Areán, Miguel Ángel Cordera, Javier Peláez and Omar Rodriguez-Graham. That meeting was called Tiro cruzado and was made up of a brief selection of works on canvas in medium and small format, while the current exhibition, Versus, presented in the Project Room of the Arróniz Gallery, integrates works on paper where the drawing It allows us to observe one of the veins that most congregates, instead of confronting, both artists; likewise, some larger-scale paintings are included. Other confrontations and coincidences that can be observed in this exhibition is the juxtaposition of planes, in which there is a recurring tendency to gather semi-geometric fields, particularly diagonal and horizontal lines, above or below words, spellings and unfinished, broken figurations; or else, the confluence of large areas of solid color together with diluted, diffuse marks and traces, residues of a struggle to contain and liberate the empty space of the painting, that dual and inevitable presence that both attracts and threatens. However, this exhibition, Versus, or the previous one, Tiro cruzado, is not a one-round combat, but the continuation of various encounters in which its participants have known how to cross the natural border of the generations to which they belong, as well as the serious distance that goes from the teacher to the student, and they have managed to spin a story that extends to the past almost three decades in the painting workshops in Arteum, under the generous advice of Gilberto Aceves Navarro, who at a billiard table in the Countess prior to the pandemic, a clear reminder that painting, like any act of creation, is a three-way game involving an author, his work and the viewer. And it is precisely the latter, in his absent presence, who, scrutinizing the former, catches a glimpse of the other, leading to a fortunate carambola of coincidences, clashes, and resonances.