WALTERIO IRAHETA
THE PERSISTENCE OF YELLOW
This exhibition project is the product of a desire—of an obsession with returning to the fundamentals, to the knowledge that fascinated Walterio Iraheta when he trained as a graphic designer; it is a retrospective gaze toward a significant period that shaped his trajectory as an artist. It is an act of love, an enchantment with the basic formal elements through which creation happens on a surface. It is also a fixation on a color that marks the history of the image: yellow—that hue that embodies brutality and sensuality, that propels light and vital energy. Iraheta materializes a (total) drawing-installation that serves as an apology for the plane (surface) as the site for composition; his wager is concentrated on the unfolding of visual thought upon the gallery walls. Layout—a core term in the field of graphic design—permeates not only the series of pieces the artist presents, but the installation itself. Iraheta’s initiative is likewise infused with his passion for drawing, for the line that shapes forms; the consistency of the line, and even that capricious perversion that bends it, seduce the artist in equal measure.
In the works presented, each sign holds value in relation to the others, and even more so in terms of its placement within space. These are disparate formal elements that acquire meaning within the “frame” of playful operations Iraheta has conceived. Moreover, they suggest a certain mobility, as if they were part of a museographic strategy—as if the viewer could, if they wished, enter and dislocate the visual content. They are orders tempting other orders. What becomes decontextualized is immediately re-signified within the compositions created by the artist. The exhibition as a whole simulates a kind of unfinished “visual-graphic essay”: each work is a fragment made of fragments, of layers. The artist’s feat lies in constructing “a single image”; hence the installation-like nature of the exhibition. In his words: “my intention is that it feels like a large drawing being made in the gallery space.” Walterio has created visual codes that repeat, that insist through their material presence; it is the semiotics of a universe that points to other universes: design, anatomical drawing, color theory, typography, geometry. At the same time, it is impossible to overlook Iraheta’s evocation of his rigorous studies in the history of art and design. The spirit of avant-garde artists who led futurism, constructivism, suprematism, or dadaism emerges as a powerful visual echo: Malevich and Mondrian’s insistence on monochromatic planes; Rodchenko’s proposals as he attempted to eradicate representation in his pictorial works and experimented with photography and collage; the disruptive audacity of the Bauhaus as a school.
Drawing — collage
Here, drawing embodies the scientific, the human, and the poetic—three dimensions through which the artist produces a sensation of strangeness, a “low-intensity” shock. To linger before these images is to ask oneself what those anatomical forms are doing alongside those hieratic (almost melancholic) faces amid formal elements that evoke an editorial design exercise.
Are these images dissections? Look closely: there is something dead in them that contrasts with the vividness of the yellow color. They are surfaces that hold compositions as calculated as they are whimsical, in which the artist lays bare his beginnings as a draftsman and designer. They are planes that contain heterogeneous times, polyphonic and ambivalent images; perhaps it is precisely for this reason that an “uncanny strangeness” rises unabashedly. For Freud, the concept of the unheimlich, translated into French as inquiétante étrangeté, is not something that dwells outside our realm but quite the opposite: it is the (unspeakable) anxiety provoked by things that hover around us—those most familiar things which suddenly become strange. They startle us (De Diego, 2010).
We do not know with certainty how those illustrations of gynecological-obstetric medical instruments act beside a lovely monosyllable—and we will never know. But their presence simultaneously excites and repels us. In some way, Iraheta is speculating with these images (and he enjoys this, it seems clear). He feels a fascination for the forms that appear there—the ones he has constructed through his anatomical drawings and the others, which emerge as typographic presences or delightfully curved textures. His drawing-collages, with their straight cuts, form a visual system of promises. “Cutting with a sharp knife (or scalpel), guided along the edge of a ruler, is also a way of remaining faithful to the manufacturing values of everyday hand tools” (Taylor, 2009): it is a homage to materials and to their potential for transformation and meaning.
These works—arbitrarily—show us the beauty of the straight line alongside the curvature of a typeface or the sinuousness of the human body. But it is a camouflage incapable of concealing its sharpness; the most attentive gazes detect its ambiguities and that form of beauty that becomes, at times, even perverse…
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Notes
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Suprematism pushed abstract simplification to its extreme in pursuit of a non-figurative artistic reality. Malevich gathered several artists into the group known as Supremus, which included Lissitzky, Popova, and Rodchenko.
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Estrella De Diego references Freud’s concept of the unheimlich (1919) in Lo siniestro y las estrategias del terror, EXIT BOOK Ed. 13, 2010. Editor: Rosa Olivares.
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Taylor, Brandon (2009). At the Edge of Creation. In Cut & Paste, Exit 35. Madrid.