Roberto Infantes

galería FÚCARES_Almagro

“Inexcusable cities”
Opening: saturday 3th October 2009 / 8pm
Exhibition: from October 3th to December 12th 2009

The city is the metaphor par excellence of contemporariness. That which signals modernity is city life. Man (civilised man) cannot be understood without the city. Wrapper and dream. Cellophane and coffin for progress. Civis and dump. The city is an artefact inhabiting us, building us. To our great regret, even if we choose to disbelieve or flee, cities live in us – cities that do not belong to town planners nor to architects, nor to politicians, “nor to God or to anybody”, in the verses by García Calvo. The modern city is the scenery of that which is real, the appearance of that which is real and has been sublimated as territory, the trace of a very short historical route in the wide arc of time that comprises the history of the world. However, we identify city and world, city and history, city and man, civis and reason, polis and progress.
The work by Roberto Infantes in this first solo exhibition seems to place itself on that state of things – on that accumulation of accumulations – that is our modern urban environs, so as to establish a new set of semantic reverberations. As if from the phenomenon of the edified city, post-constructivist reasoning sprang – uncertainties about its actual cartography, abyssal crevices that heralded a new status of that feeding reality that inhabits us.
R. Infantes starts from beautiful perspectives of cities, from aesthetic metropolitan framings, from perfect symmetries in black and white, from recognizable urban angles – from evidences of a canonical architecture formed by vertical and horizontal lines, by vanishing lines and geometries taken from that which is visible. And from this point, he seeks an internal and at once external weave of that which is real. A weave made out of contradictions which would lie, on the one side, in a fully powerful chromatic concept – but applied to the medium with a weird and subtle good taste – as against a photographic negation of colour; and on the other side, in his seaming together photography and painting. And this in turn rather twists the visual elements by his incorporating painting sometimes even on the transparency of glass, which may lead us, almost unsuspectedly, to recognize an experience that has, in my opinion, a more neatly conceptual character.
A work whose exactness and technical making dodges the aestheticism of the immediate. The fact of walking on that uncertain edge of an apparent – paradoxical – preciousness should be interpreted as an ironic loop of a strictly personal nature. By this I mean an apparent beauty of the contrived document as regards the pictographic nature of the first medium (photography of urban abodes inhabited by man and his actions) and a play of transformation versus destruction from that very visual (apparently “beautiful”) cartography. In sum, a look at a moving space under the strain of opposites – plus I don’t know how much of deconstruction or of extinction of that which is real, or of reconstruction towards a new sense of the geometrical.
Thus, Roberto Infantes’s cities become enigmatic under that rain of sharp colours that flows from their guts, perhaps graceful in this so cinematographic black and white, so apparently sumptuous and beautiful, like a ceremony of the unsuspectedly chaotic – yes, a ceremony of the inexcusable.

José Luis Loarce
Ciudad Real, September 2009