Note su una Residenza

 

 

di Miguel Osuna

 

 

We insist in trying to refer to continuity as a concept that is linear and horizontal. I believe the idea is more complicated than that.

 

A CHANGE OF ENVIRONMENT

Changing studio location is simple. Just pick up and go! Easier said than done. For me, any change in working environment always bring repercussions. These repercussions, let’s be clear, are not necessarily negative.

Changing work environments has always … intimidated me, let’s say.

I believe that, to a higher or lesser degree, any person that is dedicated to this has, at some point, considered how elusive the muse can be. Her absence can cause a range of faked indifference to an outright paralyzing terror, and a change of work place can distract her. That was at least how I felt the first time I moved studios in Los Angeles. After several times of repeating the exercise, the most important is to capture the new “frequencies”, “signals”, and “rhythms” that the new space offers.

RESIDENCY

The last time I was an artist in residency, it was in Mexico. I was already living in Los Angeles by then. The place of residency was the City of Zacatecas. I spent 3 months in the almost 500 old city that had been once a mining enclave. The city is built mainly with this type of pink sandstone in a viceroy-colonial baroque style of the “Churrigueresco” variety. This, in addition to the red-stone terrain, that tints the air in rich warm tones, contribute to a particular atmosphere that impregnates the air. The city is unusually invested in the arts. Several of the most venerated masters of the modern abstract school, like Felguerez, Goitia and the Coronel brothers, lived and worked there.

Just before I started this residency in Napoli invited by ART1307 Cultural Institution, I was working in Los Angeles, immerse in an extensive series of landscapes that were profoundly inspired by my life in California. For years, as an artist-colleague observed once, I was “painting my surroundings”. The resulting work, inspired in great measure by the city and looked at through a lens both photographic and experiential, was a response to what I saw as a visitor, immigrant, and finally a inhabitant of LA. The work I generated in Zacatecas, was a group of landscapes that was stylistically a continuation of the pieces populated by the LA freeways, but this time influenced by the new surroundings. Besides the obvious subject differences, my color palette was also influenced by the light and new environment.

My work has changes and evolved through the years. “Painting my surroundings” stopped

somewhat abruptly some time ago, and, immediately, relatively speaking, a new, abstract body of work started flowing. This new production has moved from strictly monochromatic line work and calligraphy to a series of works based in “pigment reductions” and surface sculpting with brush textures. I started to bring back oil painting into the work, where now, the pigment itself, as that, is center stage. “Painting my surroundings” became “Painting the interior of my thoughts”. In a way, a sort of inner landscape.

This is the work I am planning to develop in Naples for my residency at ART1307.

This is the first time I am in Italy, and I am very curious as to how the new environment will affect the work.

As far as what I intend to focus on in this residency, I am interested in “repeating” the exercise of how my abstract work developed in LA, and, replicating the exercise, from monochromatic calligraphies to surface sculpting pieces, see the “Naples Effect” in the new work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONTINUITY

The notion that continuously inhabited places exist fascinates me. Places inhabited continuously for thousands of years. Places where people have arisen, eaten, loved, suffered, enjoyed and created uninterruptedly. And all this time has resulted in an uninterrupted chain of relationships, exchange of ideas, encounters of opinions, observation and reaction to witnessing the fruits of human intellect.

Continuous communication for 2,500 years. Some episodes here and there threatened the

process, but somehow, some way…

(BY THE WAY, AFTER MANY GREY-COLD DAYS, THE SUN HAS MADE A SERIOUS

APPEARANCE TODAY, THE FIRST TIME SINCE I ARRIVED. IT WAS A GLORIOUS THING)

but I was talking about continuity.

Through this residency, not only I have the privilege of inserting myself in the narrative, but also to have been the object of an invitation to one of the local dialogs. This one, in particular, has been taking place for the last 400 years. My work will be part of a local collection that has been put together for the longest time. The collection of Pio Monte della Misericordia.

Humanly, what does one do when presented with a proposal of this magnitude? To mount in a private and spectacular panic!

But, as it’s been said from a long time ago: Adapt or Die!

Miguel Osuna

Naples, April 2018