Born practically with the century, non-figuration can be considered as the most significant aesthetic adventure of our time. The progressive widening of its options, its integration in multiple sectors of communication, the renewed activity of its questioning, testify to its uninterrupted presence on the various fronts of the present. This, in spite of the historical ruptures that have occurred in recent decades, with the nostalgic resurgence of DADA, the invasion of concepts, the overkill of the image, the noisy offensive of wild neo-figurations, and in spite of the persistent reticence of an important fraction of an under-informed public, riveted to the soothing seductions of representation that is still ironic, if not hostile to this form of expression.
However, there are as many cringes among the non-figuratives as among the supporters of the image. If the lyricists appeal to the instantaneousness of the gesture, to the subconscious as an organising principle, the constructors, right up to the minimalists, are fond of stripped-down climates and exact sequences. And if some of them, in the 1970s, put painting at stake by analysing the material reality of the canvas outside the frame, from artisanal practices evacuating the emotional and the historical and amalgamating an ideological project of the Marxist type linked to the epiphenomena of May 68, their posterity was able to renew with the intoxication of colour and the freedom of the hand, away from doctrines and chapels.
It is mainly these young generations that constitute the body of this exhibition. This exhibition brings together a selected range of individualities working in a register corresponding to their own nature, around the same spiritual convictions, woven of the sensory and the rational, turned towards active meditation, beyond the artifices of the anecdote.
Gerard Xuriguera
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