Cromotipia

2019

Jesús Gallardo Gallery. León, Guanajuato. Mex.
Curatorship: Mónica Ashida

Exhibition text-
In 1949, the Albanian photographer Gjon Mili, convinced the then famous Pablo Picasso to create a series of photographs in which, helped by a small light source, he projected a wide series of drawings in the air, recreating some of the most emblematic images of his plastic practice. Although three decades before, Man Ray had already experimented with the light movement in photography, it is these impressions that consolidate the concept of Light Painting before the general public.

Since the beginning of his career, the work of Francisco Ugarte (Guadalajara, Jalisco. 1973) has been based mainly on the understanding and analysis of space. His training as an architect provided him with the tools to develop a rigorous creative process that has given life to refined and subtle pieces that transport the viewer to a world of contemplation; which is patiently accessed through the senses, for one to be able to perceive the slight changes that the play of light and shadow draw during the passage from day to night, materializing the immaterial without paying attention to the medium or the technique.

Ugarte's creation mixes the ability to be amezed -typical of childhood- with the inquisitive nature of the scientist who, guided mainly by an inexhaustible curiosity, try to understand the world.

His body of work is generally not interested in color. This trait can be traced back to their years of academic training where,
a reflection that arose during the Renaissance and in general during the shaping of the
Western culture, architecture began to exercise more in the field of intellectual search than at the level of artisanal craft. Ugarte transfers this vision to other
aspects of arts where he has developed his work, which leads him to prioritize
the purity of the form over exuberance of color.
Despite this aesthetic trend, in C R O M O T I P I A Ugarte explores other fields
and ventures into the world of color.

The works shown here present a facet in the processes of Francisco Ugarte that is
much closer to the tradition of miniature work than to trends
of digital art.

Using slide projectors, a vintage technological support, Ugarte creates
enveloping atmospheres through the manipulation of intervened slides with colored filters; which, when projected, acquire a warmth more typical of the plastic fields than the digital media.
Endowed with a phenomenological connotation; temporal and subjective at the same time, the pieces are manifested periodically in the view of the audience, with a certain rhythm,
energizing the aesthetic experience.

These light paintings acquire an unusual physicality in space. The sound of
reel spinning, the heat given off by the projector, but mainly, the visual expansion of
thorough manual work; allow the artist to display microscopic
imperfections that, with the passage of time and the manipulation of photografic transparencies, give these works a mysterious and interesting character, achieving the
envelop the viewer in a sensorial experience, that transits naturally between the
tradition and the avant-garde.