ART STATEMENT My work represents the hidden spaces residing between the impetuous forces of the subconscious and the controlling mechanisms of reason and the conscious.In the latest series of paintings, the depicted objects enact a collision between the rational and the emotional, between nature and culture. They are opposite aspects that are at once reciprocal and inseparable. These collisions evoke an interplay of abstraction and figuration. The action within the painting is key.
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WHATEVER. 52"x 40. 2023
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I AM HERE. 30"x30". 2023
THE YES MEN 47"x 47". 2023
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GOYA'S WHIMS. 40"x 40" 2022
GOYA'S TRIBUTE 31"x 31" 2022
9_ 40"x40" 2021
4_52"x 52" 2021
2_18"x 18". 2020
1_30"x 48" 2019
23_30"x 30" 2019
1_30"x 30". 2018
8_40"x 40" 2017
8_47" x 47" 2012-2016
20_26"x 26". 2011
4_25" x 15" 2012
ESSAY
Chilean born, Brooklyn based Raimundo Rubio is a painter of rare artistic integrity who for decades has ignored profitable artistic trends in favor of rigorous artistic reflection. While conceptual art reigned over the art world, Rubio, a true disciple of Rembrandt and Velázquez, remained an artist fiercely preoccupied with aesthetic process and painterly form. Through form, he is also devoted to what is hidden beyond the glossy surface of material things. Like the Goya of the Black Paintings—a crucial reference in his art—Rubio is fascinated with the unconscious forces lurking beneath the iron logic of human reason. Rubio—whose work has been exhibited internationally to critical acclaim—has primarily focused on painting, though in his long, prolific career he has also ventured into photography, performance art, and installation. His work enacts, in his own words, “a collision between the rational and the emotional, between nature and culture.” As Genesis (2018-2019), his new acrylic and watercolor series, perfectly illustrates, in Rubio’s work this goal seems to be best served by probing the poetic revelations of science. His alluring canvases, filled with floating spheres traveling through the ether or exploding into bloody smithereens, seem to suggest mysterious cosmic forces like the big bang and the dark gravitational forces of black holes, recently photographed by astronomers. In his own words, his composition are “sprinkled sprays of strong colors [that] dissolve onto the canvas leaving the delicate, lacy, swirling marks that evoke the movements and changes of the cosmos.” In Genesis, Rubio harkens back to the beginning of his own career, his own artistic genesis, to deepen his probing into the nature of time and space. In his most recent paintings Rubio seems to give an artistic rendering to the magical and counterintuitive ideas of quantum mechanics. In this sense, Rubio is also a true heir of Jackson Pollock’s action painting. But Rubio’s lyrical, yet unsettling cosmic explosions, which open up his paintings both to the wonder of the infinite cosmos and to the quantum finitude of subatomic reality, also have the geometrical, mathematical rigor of Vladimir Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, Rubio’s two major constructivist influences. It is this delicate synthesis between the rational and the emotional, between the discoveries of contemporary physics and the wondrous musings of the poet and myth maker, that has moved Rubio to revisit the central concepts of the metaphysical abstraction of the 1940s, particularly that of Chilean artist Roberto Matta, a subtle but persistent presence in Rubio’s art. As seen in Genesis, Rubio’s work’s fusion of scientific rationality and poetic emotion is not purely conceptual, though, but conveyed through an exacting painterly process of pigment and color. Although Rubio is ultimately concerned with the grand questions of artistic representation and its relation to the nature of reality, he has not eschewed the social and the political. His art has always been fueled by a strong ecological ethos, as seen for instance in his otherworldly installation photographs of objects buried in salt, which, like Genesis, also evoke mythic (and Biblical) realms. But unlike many contemporary artists whose message often overwhelms their work, Rubio’s is woven into the art form itself. Rubio’s art never imposes its meaning on the spectator but lets it simmer, allowing the spectator to wander around freely (as I have often done while contemplating his hypnotic paintings) to generate her or his own meaning. Rubio’s art is best described as pure visual poetry: beautiful, orderly and precise, but also deeply emotional, uplifting and awe-inspiring. It gives spectators lyrical dreamscapes that blur the line between depth and surface and dream and reality, inviting them to lose themselves in reverie. Aesthetically stunning objects in themselves, his paintings are never purely escapist and they never descend into kitsch, controlled as they are by the artist’s sharp, wise, critical mind. As Goya wrote of his series Caprichos (1799): “Fantasy devoid of reason produces impossible monsters; infused by reason is the mother of all arts and the origin of its marvels.” Raimundo Rubio’s latest work is indeed marvelous art, fantastical and exciting, yet enlightening and consoling--as only art can be.