Alexander Corujeira’s (Buenos Aires, 1961) work is regularly exhibited from 1992 in different exhibition halls and galleries around Spain. On this occasion it is Espacio Uno at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía which hosts the exhibition entitled La tarea del paisaje, a reflection on the construction and pictorial composition of natural elements in abstract key.
Corujeira studies at the School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and moves to Spain in 1991 where he settles. His background is based on a European constructivist tradition from the interwar period. The Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García is one of the evident influences in his early works, where geometry plays a central role. However his compatriot has a more direct influence of this sort on Corujeira: Alfredo Hlito, co-founding member of Asociación Arte Concreto Invención and signatory of the Manifiesto Invencionista from 1946. Over time, Corujeira’s trajectory evolves and takes a step beyond geometry. The artist pursues immersion in an organic poetry, where forms do not develop in terms of decipherable parameters but evolve wrapped in the enigmatic.
This exhibition at Espacio Uno consists of twelve large acrylic paintings. The sinuous shapes and the wide colour range including certain dark colours characterise the work of the Argentine artist. The style is embodied in works whose titles are symptomatic of the theme: Soplo, Alba, Continente, Niebla púrpura and Vegetal celeste, they refer to his awareness of the phenomenon of nature; he finds in painting a way of expressing this. In all of them there is a crystallisation of the mutable, the desire to secure the natural occurrence, and at the same time to decipher it, as if it were a music score. The meandering lines that Corujeira traces can be interpreted in reference to calligraphy. However, the legibility of the traces alludes only to what is random, unfolding full of freedom. Joining the pieces already mentioned are: Canción de la sangre y el cerezo, La tarea de la rama, Animal, Ceniza plata, La ruta del jardín celeste, Del cuaderno de las aguas and Gran boca.
La tarea del paisaje, the piece that gives its name to the exhibition accompanies these twelve paintings on display. The piece is painted on the wall and occupies a space of nearly thirty square metres. The dialogue with the rest of the work is straightforward and revealing. The pictorial language patent in the acrylics moves to the walls, and manages to take over the exhibition space as a painting and architecture at the time.
Corujeira triumphs in his effort to ensure the spectator’s vision does not stop for a single moment to contemplate his works, which contain the arteries through which his paintings flows.
