Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce Alignment, Raúl Illarramendi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition comprises work from two related series of drawings engaged in the history of abstraction as well as by the forms and textures of urban topography. Alignment will be on view in Tribeca from January 11 – February 24, 2024.
For Illarramendi, the aesthetic independence of gesture, color, and form can be found all around us: plastered vitrines, sullied cement walls, and scratched car doors are all tableaux worthy of attention. Indeed, his drawings (or “non-drawings,” in the artist’s terms) represent traces of human activity and construction found within contemporary cityscapes. The exhibition, in all, builds a lexicon of urban decay through its distillation of forms such as cracked pavement, surface scuffs, and urban scribbles. These fundamental visual units collaborate within intricately layered abstractions executed with colored pencil, oil stick, wax paste, and gouache on canvas. Visually reminiscent of abstract expressionism, Illarramendi’s work lays bare the movement’s relation to the world outside the canvas. Pure painterly expression does not preclude the built environment, but rather can be found within it. The material histories of cities, expressed through their palimpsestic surfaces, are the nuclei of visual expression in Alignment.
Illarramendi began his EA works by collecting photographs of formal and textural situations on the city streets around his home. Compelled by “the traces of use and misuse” – dirt patinas, scratches – he captured images of doors from garages, lories, and exterior electric cabinets. The artist fastidiously recreates finger marks, anonymous scribbles, and other signs of wear and tear on his canvases, thus unlocking the potential for meaningful aesthetic experience within the dirty and mundane material of daily life.
The series’ title stands for “evidence of absence”—what seems to be a positive mark or gesture on the canvas is in fact the absence of pigment. A line is not created through a singular stroke of a colored pencil, but rather is contoured through meticulous shading of the area surrounding the line. Illarramendi’s technique negates his subject, in that the mark is the empty space where drawing does not exist. Such negative spaces not only produce an interior glow, an emanating light, but also leave space for the a priori marks and gestures.
In the sub-series (smokers) EA, Illarramendi uses oil stick, wax pastel, and gouache on canvas to reinterperet images of anonymous brushwork, found primarily on failed business windows in different cities. The artist found images of smokers to be a common motif within such vernacular graffiti across cities and countries. The proliferation of smoker imagery can be understood as either “the expression of a collective juvenile subversiveness” or as nostalgic “remnants of a not-so-distant past when depictions of smoking could still be found in cartoons and influence expressive culture.”
“For me,” Illarramendi writes, “depicting this brushwork represents the ultimate infatuation with how seductive the triad of paint, brush, and gesture can be. It is not my own gesture represented in these drawings, but a mixture of selected fragments of someone else’s actions, traces, and gestures.” Illaramendi’s documentary urge is one divorced from narrative and temporality—his compositions, instead, index the expressive energy of the most simple readymade drawings, reinterpreted for the viewer through a much more scrupulous and labor intensive technique.
When speaking about his work and its influences, Illarramendi emphasizes “hand intelligence,” a kind of visual intelligence that can be cultivated, but is ultimately an intrinsic aesthetic-expressive ability endowed to humans. It is an intelligence evident in history’s first cave paintings as well as in the work of modern giants such as Cy Twombly and Ana Mendieta. Recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially its image-generating capacities, clarify the definition and value of hand intelligence and pose questions about our how our sensibilities will grate against or find a welcome home in AI visuality. Contemplating these issues, Illarramendi writes: “I indulged in an exercise where I prompted an AI Image generator to ‘make a finger wipe drawing on a dusty window of a cartoon face smoking a cigarette,’ to which the program produced five images in less than five seconds.”
A few vestiges of the uncanny AI images appear furtively throughout the works, though it is not totally clear which are culled from the program, and which are culled from the physical world. Each are referred to equally in their absence, as voids within rich constellations of color and texture. Illarramendi’s negative spaces are indifferent to their source material, operating as evidence of gestures anew.
Raúl Illarramendi (b. 1982, Caracas, VE; lives and works in Méru, FR) studied Visual Arts and Art History at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, IN, USA and holds an MFA from the University Jean Monet, Saint Etienne, FR. Illarramendi began his artistic training in 1998 as an apprentice to the painter Felix Perdomo and later became a member of the Circulo de Dibujo of the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas Sofia Imber. Illaramendi has exhibited widely, including at Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris, FR; Museum of Fine Arts of Cambrai, FR; Lieu d’ Art Contemporain, Sigean, FR; Carré de Aubusson, Aubusson, FR; Maison de Arts et Loisirs, Laon, FR; Foundation Fernet Branca, St. Louis, FR, among others. He is the recipient of the Jean Chevalier Award for Painting in Lyon, FR.