Duration: May 15th / August 30th, 2009
Curated by: Javier Rubio Nomblot

Author(s): Emilio Gañán

Vacío figurado represents the first great exploration in sculpture grounds made by the geometrical painter Emilio Gañán. However, more than a sculpture, Vacío figurado is the development in space of what a plane implies. It is an evocation, not exempt from poetry, of those rules, conventions and tricks which constitute by themselves the essence of pictorial systems of representation, and which become the argument of his own painting.

The ambiguous shapes, painted by the artist directly on the walls of the room, interact –complicating and completing their reading- with the big sculpture specifically created for the museum’s space: a metal structure, approximately fourteen metres long and five metres tall, which reproduces the lines, angles and colours that characterise the artist’s pictures, and whose argument are precisely the relationships and interpretations based on the distance and the size of the objects systematized by the conic perspective, and which rationalise and set our world’s vision into a somewhat exaggerated hyerarchy.

This apparently simple piece is the result of a long and complex process. In Vacío figurado there is a convergence of the artist’s impressions during his stay at the Spanish Academy in Rome –e.g. the famous Borromini’s Perspective Gallery, whose shape of truncated pyramid is clearly evoked­– and of the influence of the early minimalism in his pictorial oeuvre –in this case, also very clearly, the Modular Structures by Sol Lewitt in the beginning of the sixties. And if his painting has always been characterised by the suggestion of ambiguous spaces, where the perspective illusion seemed helplessly rejected, this inhabitable sculpture works in the opposite sense, as if it were a generator of plain compositions. When we move inside it, the walls –where we can see a mise en abyme of the sculpture– render endless combinations and suggest spaces that we accompany with our gaze and our mind.