Jacinto Moros

Drawing in the space    

Francisco Carpio, 2002

"Line is the footprint of a point that can't keep still". Actually, if we concede that this brief, humorous and mildly poetic definition is right (and why not?) -just as *Ramon proposes us- we find that the point in motion breeds lines. A more or less hyperactive point, that draws as it rushes busily through the plane and/or the space, innumerable roads and ways.

In reality, sensu stricto, line doesn't exist in nature, it is only about meeting -in some cases failure to meet- and confluence between planes. But that shouldn't matter so much to us; geometry is a subject sufficiently serious, boring and reasonable for us to feel the right to ignore it. Besides, it's already known that from Oscar Wilde on, nature imitates art. I am sure that some of these thoughts were cooking in Jacinto Moros' own head, when he decided to start drawing -with lines- in the space.

What he is really trying to do with his work is: to take the visual minutes of the road that this unruly and unsettled point describes; to show that nature is mistaken and that line, like a frozen and motionless journey, can exist if we really feel like it. Like a plastic prestidigitator, he tries to catch with material that mobile itinerary, that anxious and dynamic zigzag which can be a line in the air.

In the genesis of his sculptures, we perceive a certainly close relationship, a brotherhood of formal intentions with painting and drawing. It's not by chance that Moros started his artistic trajectory as a painter. In this way these works are like drawings in the space, like brush-strokes of color that rebel against their bidimensional destiny and long for a new 3-D body. The dramatic and tortured sediment that lives in many of these pieces, and that however, doesn't prevent them from giving off a lyric and harmonious taste, doubtless has something to do with this titanic struggle to grow in space and escape from the flat tyranny of the plane. Pieces that are like notes in a diary, like letters of a binnacle notebook that indicate the direction to follow, mapped on paper, and which will finish acquiring -literally- a tridimensional body. A body that maintains a constant state of liquid mobility: a solid stream of fluid wood that floats, stops and, then again, goes on rising from the foundation of the base.

There are no straight lines, they all are paths and routes curving through streets of the air. Bends, curves, turns, loops, twists, meanders, foreshortenings, prances and warps. A vegetable dance of roots, trunks and branches, straightening and dancing in search of the food of light and the sun of volume.

It's not a coincidence that -given this reflection of the plant's secret world- wood has to be the material that exclusively shapes this work. The noble lineage of wood, with its veins and arteries of petrified sap, like perfect flesh and skin. Ebony, maple, ash, rosewood... colors and smells which evoke the sleepy melodies of enchanted woods. Surely this tangled and curved will which possesses them, can not be translated into other materials, except maybe forged iron. But even the metallic line tamed by the forging through a music of strokes and fire, wouldn't manage to represent the air of lightness that he gets with these sculptures. His thorough technique of work, on the basis of patiently sticking multiple and very thin veneers of wood, as if they were the layers and stratums of a vegetable and millenary archaeology, awards them equally that bearable lightness, this air of filigree and lineal sparks, which as soon it rises with nervous gesture up the walls as it twists and twists again on the table, expectant, and suspended, ready to start other new steps in the air.

With an art as tactile as the sculpture is, the treatment of the surfaces acquires an undoubted importance. The skin of these works appears to be treated with delicacy, with slow care. That skin which, as Paul Valery pointed out, ends up being transformed into the most profound, reflects a very finished and brightness, a will to take out the intrinsic beauty of the material -in this case, wood- to listen to its "inner music". The polished surfaces, delicately textured with graphite and some light chromatic, insinuations, provoke in the spectator the desire to touch them, which turns out to be the ultimate test for the sculpture. That which is born for the eye also searches for continuity with the extension of the touch. 

After a first look, Jacinto Moros' compositions could appear before our eyes as if they were only abstract objects, deprived of the wish of representation. However, they are forms which equally could apply Brancusis' words to: "...that thing they call abstract, it's the most realistic one, because what is real, is not the outside but the idea, the essence of the things".  Essences that are converted into figurative echoes, convulsive, dancing and curled bodies which get twisted, raised, confused, stretched and coiled in a dance of lines, in a authentic spatial choreography. They are enchanted snakes too, spirals of smoke drawn by an idle cigarette, solidified acoustic waves, colored ribbons thrown in the air by some invisible girl, capricious columns of a vegetable architecture, wooden bandages for treating the injuries of the wind... 

1959: Born in Cetina, Zaragoza. Spain.

1991-1992,1996-2002:  He lived and worked in New York.

He presently lives and works in Madrid.

SOLO EXHIBITION

2010

• Galería May Moré, Madrid.

2009

• Galería Múltiple, Madrid.
• Ars et Scientia, Centro Teknon, Barcelona

2008

• PazyComedias Gallery. Valencia.

2007

• May More Gallery. Madrid (Catalog)

2004

• May More Gallery. Madrid (Catalog)

2002

• May Moré Gallery. Madrid (Catalog)

1999

• Carmen de la Guerra Gallery, Madrid. Spain.

1998

• Store Next Door, a window installation, artist edition.
• Whitney Museum of American Art. New York.
• FranklinFest 98, Tribeca Artwalk, New York.

1997

• FranklinFest 97, TriBeca Artwalk. New York City.

1994

• "Made in New York", Veruela's Monastery, Zaragoza. Spain. (Catalog)

1993

• Raygun Gallery, Valencia. Spain.

1991

• Fernando Duran Gallery, Madrid. Spain. (Catalog)

1989

• Aragon Hall, Bilbao-Vizcaya Bank, Zaragoza. Spain.

1987

• Begur Gallery, Begur, Girona. Spain.

1984

• Termas Hall, Alhama de Aragon, Zaragoza. Spain.

1983

• Termas Hall, Alhama de Aragon, Zaragoza. Spain.