ART REVIEWS
Stories and fragments
“Stories and fragments”, an appropiated title for the exhibition that José Luis Arbulú presents at the Artco gallery. Arbulú graduated from Ensabap – he has also studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, both experiences that have left a mark on his work.
This exhibition, which he now offers, brings together an interesting set of recent paintings, in which he proposes a true recycling, as well as a reinvention of his previous proposals. Not only in the composition of the total images. In them he achieves a true meeting of fragments that manages to relate without merging, share a broad limit without betraying the visual independence of each one, propose a true cohabitation of plastic space expertly using the subtlety of a color or the reiteration of an anonymous element and monotonous. In truth, these paintings have been assembled with small fragments, stripes or icons, which behave like words of a personal language and narrate a life diary that, for the viewer, preserves the opportunity of the open work. Elements to assemble, or data to investigate, in truth the result is free, and in the determined curiosity to achieve it, caused by the visual offer that appears explicit, although in principle cryptic, lies the greatest interest of this work. In addition to these easily identifiable data, Arbulú resorts to signs, graphs, serial spots, geometric spaces, visual units such as points or harmonic frameworks, some small repeated abstraction, the organization in irregular polyptychs, complementing or diversifying the possibility of a single and foreseeable. A serious and interesting proposal, well presented and loaded with many possibilities.
Elida Roman – Lima Perú
ARBULÚ: Discourse as a theme
Josè Luis Arbulù exhibits more than a dozen large-format paintings in the Gallery of the Municipal Palace of Miraflores. This is one of our young painters who, without a doubt, has already found the world of maturity. We had not seen his paintings since 1986, when he exhibited at the Gala Art Gallery, on Alcanfores Street. That exhibition had a great impact on us and we remember having written a note that took us a lot of work to write, it came with an imprint of Odilòn Redon. Then we lost sight of him because he traveled to China, to Beijing, on a scholarship.
Now, after an exhibition at the Thaddaeus Gallery in 1991, which we could not see because we were out of the country, we have returned to look and admire his new paintings. Painting always difficult but serious, with a great unity not only in the treatment of the technique but also uniformity in the modalities of its discourse. Affelineated dogs (of felines), lines of bamboo arranged in different positions, rocks, hills, hills and sky, configure the elements of its combinatorial possibilities that make us think of illustration sheets for written texts, proposals, proverbs, thoughts, whose exclusive theme in each painting they determine the eloquence of each “state”; eloquence that is valid for each title, the only link that the viewer has, but not with the real reference that has motivated the painter’s creation.
However, art alone is saved, when we feel in each painting, the sensation that its content transmits: “The Search”, bamboo with green symbolism and the feline dog in white, “The Path” black feline dog, white road, “The Exodus”, surrounded by ocher mountains and copper sky, with the graphic expression of the animal’s crestfallen body. This is how the series is put together: “Dreams”, “The Return”, “The Watcher”, “The Opposites, Silver and Sky and the Animal Between Bamboos.
Arbulú, without a doubt, is sure of what he is doing with his materials and, on the other hand, he plays with his viewer, leaving him only the enjoyment of the theme and the title for each painting, because he knows that the speculations around the “message” will convert to his work as a subsidiary of a content, when, visibly, each of his paintings stands on its own.
Elida Roman – Lima Perú
Live life
Arbulú is an outstanding painter who has traveled through various paths until embarking on his trip to China, where he resided on a scholarship, apprehending, in particular, an artistic spirit that upon his return to Peru surprised us with elusive landscapes, flat painting and an appearance of opulence that contrasted with the severe sensuality of the lines. There was in these paintings a kind of eroticization of the surface, a skin formed by metallic paint, a body tattooed with the features of the presence of the feline, or the traces of the roads. And once penetrated by this path it was difficult to glimpse the meanders through which Arbulú’s future proposals would penetrate.
However, now in Trapecio the mystery begins to be revealed in an exhibition that allows us to appreciate a painter who ventures to penetrate new concepts without completely abandoning the past. That is why the planes remain, but today they are accompanied by a rich and precise texture, and particularly by a geometry that fragments the painting, allowing a fusion of much of the best of the century in the West, on which it incorporates its Eastern memories.
Arbulù has always been a painter with outstanding technique who today presents his most personal and risky proposal. The acceptance of a color that is not afraid of stridency – as is the case with his magnificent reds – and a renewal of the presence of man, long absent from his paintings, who now appears in the shadows. Finally, if the gilding is repeated or the landscape has an almost solitary presence in the exhibition, it is to allow the author to translate into geometric terms the approaches of that stage that marked his work so much.
For many, Arbulú’s exhibition is a farewell to the past and an adventure towards the future. For us it is a splendid symbiosis between both stages of life that brings together the experience of a man who today orients his search to more closed and simultaneously more daring processes, maintaining the rigor of the beginnings and the severity that constitutes the essence of his work. . His are austere paintings that do not evade visual pleasure, in a game of contradictions where we find a respectable painter, whose rich career we are committed to following.
Luis E. Lama – Lima Perú
Reunion with Arbulú’s work
The seventh return of Josè Luis Arbulù is a set of recent paintings that allows us to rediscover the work of an artist who has always raised justified expectations.
Starting from a figuration where the symbolic commanded a discourse between narrative and judged, his experiences in Europe and China marked and modified the iconographic vocabulary and also the system of construction of an image that accepted and incorporated the East, a lack of concern for the traditional perspective, and an internment in the most linear and monochromatic synthesis of the form, comfortably deployed in the space that served before as a shelter than as an invaded area.
Later, the incorporation of certain decorative elements, as well as the use of shiny gold and silver, seemed to conspire against the quality and clarity of his initial approach, but we are now witnessing a new turn that leads him to return, with other instruments. visuals, that subtlety and rigor that characterized him.
This recent collection, which is exhibited in the Trapecio gallery, allows us to find a decisive advance towards abstraction that is gradually gaining on it, always moving towards commitments of formal synthesis. The allusion to the landscape, severe, austere, measured and very controlled, now assumes a shared role with the signic or geometric, the imprecise as an exact reflection and rather aspiring to the strict symbolic.
The color assumes dry ranges and well placed and distributed, making this painting not at all concessive and effortlessly attractive in its severity. It is evident that Arbulù is in the process of a transition towards objectives not yet defined. Intelligent and analytical transition towards the possibilities that painting itself offers to this interesting and talented artist and that makes us ratify the seriousness that has always characterized his work.
Elida Roman – Lima Perú
Arbulú: exhibition rich in number and content
When weeks ago we were able to approach the recent work of Josè Luis Arbulù, we had a first and brief approximation to a happy approach, where the conjugation of the previous elements of his work were united and reworked through the incorporation of technical and stylistic elements, that the artist collected from his recent experience in China.
We now have a much broader, more fruitful and definitive encounter with his proposal, in the exhibition, rich in number and content, presented at the Thaddaeus gallery. Despite a first immediate vision, which could associate his paintings with traditional Chinese, it is inevitable that That “something more” of intention captures us and takes us, imperceptibly, along deep paths of consciousness.
These landscape-scenarios do not have the pretension of ephemeral expression of a moment. They serve to house the attitude of the element-character, in this case between dog and jackal, animal and symbol, perhaps a metaphor for yin and yang, light and dark.
Arbulù has been able to boldly take advantage of the possibilities of a solid, basic construction, to which he juxtaposes or superimposes stains and strokes, giving it a sure rhythm with the pretext of the path, the fence, the stone, the river, etc.; also taking advantage of the infinite possibilities of chromatic nuance that the mastery of the technique used allows. Fable or discourse, Arbulù does not propose an anecdote. His ambition goes further, we do not know if intuitively or reflexively.
These protagonists loaded with strength, instinct, and contained passion, seem to seek the impossible shelter. Solitude, predestination, between helplessness and dominance, existential ambiguity, we can imagine, project, play, build and destroy to once again invent, all the arguments and feelings that encourage and motivate us.
In his work “Between seeing and thinking”, J. Elliot, referring to the idea of style, tells us – and the quote seems appropriate to us “… In climactic moments of a cultural formulation, man, united in a coherent group idiosyncratically defined, genetically stable, “alive” under an atmosphere of clarifying ideas, and endowed with wisdom, could resolve, in relation to his vision of the world, and thus create a mental refuge with his forms in the metaphysical wilderness. In other words, sound styles extend the mind and shelter it. Arbulù seems to be on the happy path towards that completeness.
Elida Roman – Lima Perú
Theoretical Symposium on the Beijing International Aquatint Exhibition 88
The young Peruvian painter Luis Arbulù, who perfected his studies of Traditional Chinese Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, shows in his work “Waiting,” that he perfectly masters the delicate effects of Chinese ink painting.
Both the themes and the projects are in accordance with the norms of traditional Chinese painting, in addition to innovating it.
Yu Feng
Critica de arte
Director of the China Fine Arts Gallery