96—Álvaro Negro. «Y»: Between the Eye and the Body
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From top to bottom: Untitled, 2005 Enamel on aluminium Diptych: 2 items, each 100 x 100 cm Private collection, Madrid Untitled, 2004 Enamel on mirror 480 x 80 cm Private collection, Madrid Ok!, Inside, Time and Outside II, Galería Fúcares, Madrid. Exhibition view
5 Álvaro Negro, ‘Este lienzo no es blanco,’ in Jessica Stockholder, Fundación Barrié, Vigo, 2012. 6 David Barro, Álvaro Negro. Obra 1996-2004, op. cit.
displacement, something they share with other artists, such as Adrian Schiess, whom we shall consider below. In this regard, it is important to recover the work that Álvaro Negro would prepare specifically for the aforesaid exhibition: Untitled (Painting #5, a global work which served to define the different aspects of his work around those years. On one hand, a mural painting which accommodates and give context to a dual painting in the Luzpincolour series, which here already shows a series of colour degradations, which is presented dirtier, returning to texture and to oil paint, abandoning chromatic flatness, which does appear on the wall. On the floor, paint sprayed onto a mirror activates the architecture and conditions the route. And lastly, one of his first spray paints on aluminium accompanied by a fluorescent box which chromatically contaminates the entire space. In the same hall, all this was set alongside a small picture by Jason Martin, and a dual monochrome by Pedro Cabrita Reis. With Helmut Dorner, in addition to that spatial strategy of distances, and those typesof punctuation signs in the syntax of a text, he would also share the loss of control over a painting, a taste for the inadvertent and random alteration thereof. This is something which we have already noted with regard to his first aluminiums, whose corporeal dimensional has been maintained as a constant in his work up to the present. Álvaro Negro himself provides us with the key in his essay on the work of Jessica Stockholder: ‘Randomness is handled, the accident is used5’. If, in Stockholder, the characteristics of the space modify the work, in Álvaro Negro optical problems can also be resolved with tactile solutions. Indeed, for the colourist, the important thing is modulation, relationships, revelations. Thus the artist’s following confession makes sense: ‘I am reminded of how the first of the aluminiums emerged in one of the routine technical tests: I applied the colours uniformly and, after a sweep with a spatula, there it was, for a brief instant, the image revealed itself, almost like the photographic process. It was hanging in the study for a number of months and that produced contradictory relationships and thoughts in me (which is normal with the first paintings of any series). It thought it was a good painting. I would even go as far saying attractive, but I didn’t know whether it was anything more than an nice effect which, on the other hand, was, perhaps, too Richterian.’6 But, doesn’t the same thing happen in videos such as Paris Zip or, more specifically, in Batter? In this photographic box of light from 2003 (a work produced from that manipulated randomness, from that used accident),