Loin (2010)
Aquatint on brass plate on 250g/m2 Somerset paper
66.3 x 66.3 cm each
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2010.175.6
Piet Mondrian is well-known for having embraced the formal principle of the neo-plastic picture very seriously; it could only be produced using primary colours, along with white and black, and with horizontal or vertical lines. The criteria that Izaskun Alvárez uses here are even more restrictive: only two inks and diagonal lines inclined at different angles. However, she uses this utmost economy of media to achieve a great artistic wealth, that is rigorously abstract. If it is as if we were witnessing the birth of a future alphabet, formed by subtle intersections of light and half-light, where we see only a tiny sample of their infinite possible permutations.
Her research questions the production processes. In this case, she uses a traditional printmaking procedure, but altering and eliminating the technique as a filter. She uses aquatint to create expanses of colour, even when they could have been more easily obtained using other techniques such as screen printing, digital printing or even painting. She thus uses the very techniques not as a mere formal resource, but rather as a means to reflect on its ability to construct images.
The composition, consisting of nine pieces, is part of the Composición gráfica I–IX [Graphic Composition I-IX] project; it also includes a further fifty images where the artist worked more conventionally with different printmaking techniques, including drypoint, etching, aquatint and stone lithography.
Izaskun Álvarez Gainza (San Sebastián, 1982) produces art that delves into inhabiting and the phenomenology of objects as experience triggers. Her work activates space and light as relational material, structuring installations and interventions where the objects are developed in dialogue with the whole. She uses the graphical, the material and action to generate spaces that think and feel, where perception is turned into a happening, and the viewer takes part in a poetics of being and inhabiting.