Despite this international trajectory, his life is nevertheless deeply marked by the experience of insularity. His mother was born in Cuba – another large island – and his father in Alicante, so the presence of the sea and the feeling of isolation, distance and loneliness appear as a certain constant in his work. Since his first exhibitions, in the early eighties of the last century, his pictorial language has evolved considerably. It is true that, as an artist, he has also experimented with installation, video and photography, but it is basically by observing the evolution of his painting that it is possible to see a radical change in his approaches. From an initial lyrical abstraction, not devoid of figurative elements, but fundamentally characterized by a certain material informalism, to the irruption, at the beginning of the 2000s, of an apparently classicist figurative language, very clean in composition and drawing, but with the unequivocal and repeated presence of the liquid and aqueous element. “It is perhaps then, precisely around water – Ángeles Alemán has written – when he finds his own and original path, which definitively separates him from any trace or influence of material informalism and gestural painting of his early years.”
And it is curious that it is “precisely around the water” where this radical change in his pictorial language takes place. Antonio G. González has spoken about a kind of “metaphysical Pop”, which suggests a confluence in his new pictorial language of the figurative traditions of Warholian pop, with the disturbing scenographic tradition of a Giorgio de Chirico and the so-called ” Italian metaphysical painting. And Jonathan Allen has also insisted on the “metaphysical” character of his painting, although relating it rather to the “inevitable Canarian surrealist affiliation”. Be that as it may, it is indisputable that so much reference to metaphysics unequivocally points to the philosophical content of his pictorial work.
Despite the fact that Gabriel Ortuño himself has pointed out that neither the title nor the content of this exhibition have a direct relationship with the famous book by Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, published in English in 2000 and in Spanish in 2000 2003, there are, however, some reasons that continue to make the reference to this author relevant, to deal with the work of this excellent artist.
The most obvious and the most elementary is the title itself (Liquid World / Solid World), which seems to have been taken from the reading of the Polish sociologist. It is true that the juxtaposition between the solid and the liquid, the permanent and the fluid, the immutable and the perishable, etc., may not be more than a hackneyed image to speak of the transience of life or, as in Heraclitus, of the changing reality of all that exists. Perhaps for this reason, Bauman also starts in his book from the relationship between the liquid with the temporality, although this leads him to link the solid, surprisingly, with the space.
In the older canvases of Gabriel Ortuño the solid and the liquid like to be confused in this strange distribution of their mutual roles. Well, the truth is that its flooded rooms rather convey the image of a stopped time, as if it were images of waiting, loneliness or isolation. In fact, some of the paintings in this exhibition directly present us with waiting rooms or isolated characters, surrounded by water on all sides, some of them —as in Embarcadero— also in a waiting situation.
It is therefore a reflection on time and waiting. Gabriel Ortuño’s paintings seem to want to scrupulously contemplate time. That is why everything appears stopped in them. For this reason, there is also a lot of emphasis on the situation of waiting. More than rooms, which cannot be inhabited, his paintings seem to reflect those places of transit, in which time and space converge at the same time, which we have come to call “stations”. Stations in which the painter and the viewer somehow await the irruption of the unexpected. And it is precisely this “unexpected” that makes his painting so suggestive and disturbing.
Alain Badiou spoke of événement (event) and Martin Heidegger spoke of Ereignis (event). And it is undoubtedly this waiting for the event that gives Gabriel Ortuño’s painting its eminently philosophical character.
