We hid rolling stones
and shake the bamboo that strange spring.
We got the trust of sparrows.
It was eyelash on climbing ivy.
Eduardo Hurtado
Arrullos y Escondites (Coos an Hiding Places) is the first solo show of Eduardo Hurtado at Isabel Hurley Gallery and in Malaga. Some of his latest works and a selection of revised pieces, mainly sculpture and drawing, are shown in this exhibition. The artist proposes an itinerary through the intimacy of the gesture and the idea of a sustained body, concepts always present in his career, but which undoubtedly take other perspectives in the current context. The drawings are witnesses of a journey, and the pieces on the floor becoming the result of an encounter. Love. A retaking of the intimate, the breath and the small. A return to the form and the absence of a story and, nevertheless, a specific tone, rhythm and temperature …, as if this exhibition wanted to be a song, the music sheet of a lullaby or the song of some birds in the garden.
Resume
Eduardo Hurtado (Valladolid, 1986) lives and works in Bilbao. He is a visual artist that works in the field of sculpture, voice and writing with an approach to the performing arts, from production and curation. He has been director of programs of Getxoarte and develops his work on the management of the space EL GABINETE. Graduated in Fine Arts and postgraduate in Contemporary History from the EHU, he is integrated as a PhD Researcher within the Department of Art and Technology as part of the Modern Experience Contemporary History Research group and AHOA – Memory Archive. His research work focuses on the analysis of the processes of gesture conformation. He has received different awards and scholarships within the field of cultural analysis and curating, among which are Bilbaoarte in 2020, Labore (DSS2016), Generaciones, Inéditos or the Montehermoso Cultural Center research grant. He has exhibited his work as an artist in different spaces, fairs and art centers, such as the Cervantes Institute in Berlin, the Párraga Center, Windsor Kulturgintza, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or recently at the Centro del Carmen in Valencia.
EDUARDO HURTADO. COOS AND HIDING PLACES
Flowers have their own tongues
For lovers
Federico García Lorca. Doña Rosita o el lenguaje de las flores
What it holds. What it grasps. What it embraces. What it pinches. What it touches. Where there were knots and moorings today there are metal pieces that cross through and penetrate. What were bodies lying in the middle of a
forest in ecstasy, are now shapes that folds and re folds itself . Where there was tale, story, narrative, now there is a whispering voice, a trill, a chant. Inside, close, small. Do you know that story of who fell out from his own hands
in a dream because someone reversed the crystals of the world, and so misplaced his name? (1)
After a stay in the forest some of the sculptures that met the monster (2) and danced to the sound of fantastic dances have returned to the environment of the domestic, to the house, the home. From the notion of the endearing and the homey, Freud writes, the concept of the snatched from the eyes, the hidden, the secret (3) is developed. Coos and hiding places.
Eduardo Hurtado’s sculptural training had always sought in that discipline the ability to sustain. Collecting objects of everyday use found in flea markets and shops of old, the objects were recomposed with the bodies of others by means of ties and knots. Now they only hold each other like the rope attached to the Genetian funambulist, touching each other. The reflexive exercise that moves the subject to a place in between. Touching each other in an attempt to stop being and give way to the other (4).
On this journey from the forest to the place of the dwell, the sculptures have been stripped of spices and ornaments to meet with other elements that belong to the ornamentation of the domestic, the garden and the carpets. Folding and re – folding, the carpets behave like small forms in which time-now dwells. Deleuze said that “folding-unfolding no longer means simply tensingde- tensing, shrinking-dilating, but enveloping-developing, involutingevolving. The organism is defined by its ability to fold its own parts to infinity, and to unfold them, not to infinity, but to the development stage assigned to the species” (5).
If the sculptures are the outcome of an encounter, the drawings, photographs and paintings that appear in this exhibition mean a journey towards the intimate and the small. Flowers that pollinate and germinate, hide itself among the hedges and sprout on the canvas. In the meanwhile, the song of birds is heard in the garden. And “the gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. He is at a time when the day is not divided into
rushed hours, lunch breaks or the schedule of the last bus to home. When you walking through the garden He is living at a time in which the day is not divided into rushed hours, lunch breaks or the schedule of the last bus to home.
When you walking through the garden this is the life´s rhythm according which you are living, there is no way to remember exactly at what time you went in. The landscape around us is transfigured” (6). As it happens here, between coos and hiding places. A music sheet of a lullaby that conjures fear and warns of danger tenderly. Sleep, baby, sleep.
Jesús Alcaide. 2020
(1) Espaliú, Pepe. La imposible verdad. Textos 1987-1993. 2018.
(2) Hurtado, Eduardo. Oh, monstruo. Centre del Carme. 2019.
(3)Freud, Signund Complete works. 1976.
(4) Conde-Salazar, Jaime. El fulgor (notas para una dramaturgia). Lo tocante. 2018
(5) Deleuze, Gilles. Le pli -Leibniz et le baroque 1988. Trans. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. 1993.
(6) Jarman, Derek. Modern nature . 1991
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