José Jiménez

1. The water flows freely

I am sure that the visitors of this exhibition will experience the same hypnotising effect that I felt before Ignacio Iturria's great tap, with its colossal gush of water. Even now, on looking at the picture I am still instinctively dra wn to the circle formed by the water in the washbasin, and find myself care fully scrutinising the drops to see whether they have a face. This is the power of great artists, great painters: they teach us to see the world in a different way.

The history of the great tap, however; does not end there. When I was in Buenos Aires selec ting some of the works for this exhibition, I was fascinated by a painting similar to the one exhibited here It was even bigger than the one pre sented here, and its size - some three metres high - was what made it impossible, due to the spatial restrictions of one of the rooms where it was to be hung, for me to include it in the present exhibition. Then, in Montevideo, where I was finishing up th e selec tion of works, I told Ignacio Iturria how struck I had been by the piece but that, lamentably, contrary to my desires, I would not be able to take it to Spain.

We continued working and talking, and later parted. Some three hours had passed when I returned to the workshop to continue with the selection of his works and it was then that I came across the great tap that can be seen here. I was ex tremely pleased to find out that there was a pain ting so similar to the one I had seen in Buenos Aires, the only difference being that it was slightly smaller. I remarked upon this to Pablo, one of Ignacios brothers, and also commented that it was strang e, considering my enthusiasm for the piece, that Ignacio had not mentioned that there was another version of the painting in Montevideo.

At this, Pablo smiled, pointing out that there had not been another version. He explained that when Ignacio and I had parted earlier, Ignacio went to the studio with him and he had left him there. On returning a few hours later, Pablo f ound the finished painting with Ignacio there cleaning his hands after his work. Impressive.

Later, when I remarked to Ignacio that I had been guite amazed when I found out that he had produced the piece in this time, he just smiled and dismissed it as being of little importance. He did say that, indeed, he had had to push hims elf a little in order to cover the large dimensions of the can as. He added that, in this way, for him painting was the same as poetry - once the work had been onceived and painted, one could simply write it out again even if, in the process, one w as to make the odd change to a verse or a word, here or there.

What I am most interested to underline here is not the patent abundance of talent in Ignacio painter; his expressive abilities. What I consider to be still more relevant and important is the way in which he transmits the richness of his inner world and the poetic concentration afforded to the images in the process of giving them visual expression. This represents the marrow of the great artists skill. It is from nere that his ability to make us see the world in a different way sp rings.

Painting as construction and visual excess

As a term of giving oneself over; a form of offering oneself up, painting entails a tapping of the very depths of the mind and body of the artist. It does not consist of a simple reproduction of the outside world, but is rather a form o f visual construction. As such it is a synthesis of the internal and external of the most intimate and everything that our senses capture and interpret as they interact with the world.

With Iturria, the first plane of painting possesses a physical nature, liminal: physically the body gives itself entirely over to the production of the painting in guestion. There is a slow meticulousness, akin to any craft, in the tech nical preparation and production of the work. But there is also an excess: potentially everything can by used to contribute to the realisation of the image, the impulse to paint knows no limits.

This impulse even permeates into the direct use of the paints as they come out of the tube and acguire a three-dimensional character, as they take on bodily form. In that fluid, or immediate segre gation of the pictorial, Iturria gives expression, above all, to liminal situations: bodies that embrace or even pile up on top of one another as they multiply, full of colour and exuberance. Iturria refers to these, the lightest of characters - or, put more generally, immediate emulsio ns of the pictorial - as pin turitis, similar to that immediate fluidity in writing and visualisation that is referred to as graffiti.

But, naturally, we cannot leave it there. For Iturria, the painter's character is forged with the form during the work process. This is something that materialises in the attempt to adapt the scale and size of the figures to the format of the painting. Iturria cites Degas as an example of this process. The following step in this working with the form is related to precision and detail. In his world of small characters and enlarged objects we are able to see an expression of the most int ricate detail - the most private grimaces and gestures - which ultimately contributes to that sense of entering into a world that is full of life.

Canvas, cardboard, creased cardboard and wood, with their particular physical gualities, all give a different response to the spreading out of the oils. In this expansive dynamic, the bodies can end up perforated, until the paint finall y reaches beyond the limits of the surface of the support to which it is applied. The hole gives rise to interference from the external universe in the space proper to paint. It is the experience of emptiness, the attraction to the abyss, which, in its sp eculative modu lation, ends up appearing as an over determined play of paint within paint.

The expansive nature of Iturria's painting even reaches the expression of three dimensions in his objects. But, strictly speaking, I do not think that one could describe them as sculptures. In my opinion we are dealing with painted o bjects, or with expanded painting, that seeks to go beyond any limi tation imposed by the support or its spatiality, in this way even spilling over beyond its two dimensions.

Iturria himself (1995, 34) has acknowledged that his work is not truly sculptural and he has also pointed out that the most distinctive feature of his work is in fact its maintenance of frontality: "All the elements I undertake, even if they go beyond the frame or if they might have volume, I place them frontally. What I mean is that I always maintain one of the characteristics of painting and that is frontality. I don't have a purely sculptural character".

With Iturria, further to the process of spatial construction - that is, the creation of a scene that is unified by the play of light, scale and perspective -, the endowment of what is pictorial with a strictly physical consistency is al so important. Here the mark of what is known as Spanish Informa/ismo becomes evident, but in transcendental form: streaks, scratches and oxidation leave -the marks of the passing of time on the pictorial surface. In this way, what is, at first sigh t, totally external, comes into contact with the most intimate, with the dull, pale, fragmentary images that arise in the memory.

In any case, the liminal, material utopia of Iturria's painting finds its ultimate referent in plas tic visual construction - in the use of perspective, light and shade that accentuate the relief of the figures on a background that has been most carefully selected for its variation in textures and its colourful, impastoed consistency. The interaction of perspective, visual artifice, are absolutely crucial in Iturria's painting and to his work they add a sense of mystery, of revealed dep th. This constitutes one of his most important achievements.

The flow that comes out of the tube, the paintbrush or palette knife, establish a profound communication with the pictorial material that represents the first step towards visual construction. The groove left by the palette knife in the flesh of the oil on the canvas allows the limits of the uni verse of representation, to be set. Or it casts the displacement and projection of the eyes that come out of themselves, reminding us, tangibly, that the pictorial process is a play of gazes and mirrors - to see and to be seen.

The small characters that appear peeping out at the windows, the continuous movement of voyeurs and little figures that seem to hover over the different situations and scenes - while, simulta neously, they look at us as we observe them and feel reflected, identified in their gaze - these aspects all suppose an explicit consciousness of the fact that what is decisive in the pictorial structuration of the world is the articulation of the visual.

I believe that the source of this dimension in Iturria has to be located in the tradition of the classic Spanish school and, more specifically in the adoption of that consciousness - the true master of the nature of visual construction - of the painting that grew out of Diego Velazguez's Las Meninas.

After looking, feeling the return of the gaze and then looking again, what remains is the painting. This is tbe a fundamental aspect that permeates all of Iturria's works: in them, painting is offered up as visual excess, as residue, like a journey that leads into that space normally hidden by appearances, that submissive and self-satisfied gaze.

Journey to childhood

"A short while ago, I was walking around the room, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was seeing it for the first time". These are the first lines of Elpozo (1939), Juan Caries Onetti's short story, that is one o f the most fundamental and universal examples of twentieth-century Uruguayan literature. It, too speaks to us of that distancing gaze, that vision which views everyday objects in a way that they have never previously been viewed.

Whether in visual forms or in words, art reaches its consummation when, through the distan cing of automatic, worn out responses, it manages to reach a new, unusual perception of what surrounds us. It is from this point that the true wo rld begins. A universe of fiction that has its own rules and its own plot.

The creative universe of Ignacio Iturria revolves around the mundane, the common experien ce of the urban individual in this century of cumulative information. It is concerned with banal and intrusive words, voices and noises tha t prevent us from seeing the sense of things.

In submerging us in this world, with his painting Iturria is making an attempt to give expres sion to and communicate the experience of life. The points of reference in his work are images that accompany us every day: apartment blocks; rooms and interiors; scenes that are, to a greater or les ser extent, inane; objects that generally possess their own life. More specifically there is the furniture: sideboards, bookshelves, tables, cupboards, sofas, beds, washbasins, and bedside tables. All of these objects, however; undergo a distancing process which makes us perceive them as, simultaneously, intimately known to us and yet distant.

These objects are seen through the eyes of a child, or through those of an adult who does not renounce the cleansing effect and the demands of a gaze that comes from the store of childhood images fixed in the memory. This gaze is achiev ed through the guestioning of identity, which in itself gives rise to a whole range of specific images: family, relations, photographs, altars, silhouettes, regis ters, traces. This identity moves in planes, boats or trains and, through the establishment of links with the animal and children's world, produces a profound identification among human beings, animals and objects. Or it moves about through water, space or time, using the paint that it possesses, paint which itself is also characteristically flu id.

All of this is structured in a plot that is, at one and the same time, poetry and narrative. Iturria's paintings and objects tell stories. They possess a sequentiality, implicit or explicit, that is clo sely associated with the expressi ve techniques of the comic strip and cartoons. In both cases, that variant of representation, minimal and familiar; can be found - a variant by which the children of our generation, that of Iturria, learnt to read and interiorise sequential represe ntation. It is was narrative constructed by the fusion of the visual image and the word in existence before television invaded everything, when the radio was considered to be a cult object.

The key to the maintenance of this colourful weave of images is the process of visual cons truction, the serious play, the game of painting, the acknowledgement that the most profound sense of that and of all games is the acceptance of the experience of solitude. And from this point comes the final step - painting as an offering to everyone, for other human beings and as a form of com munication with heaven.

These are the components of what Damián Bayón (1994) called "Iturria's world". They inclu de cartographic elements which are the means by which the mapping of a decidedly anthropocentric pictorial territory is enabled. The y form a set of components in which, whether it be through presen ce or absence, the main problem is the representation of the human figure, with his fears, desires and joys, with his radical and constitutive solitude.

After his long stay in Spain, in Cadaqués, Iturria (1995, 32) indicated that the first thing that came to his attention upon his return to Uruguay was the mundane nature of things: "The prosaic nature of things revives your inter est in the world, it makes you re-evaluate your personal world, your own identity. And once inside, furniture begins to take on new meaning, it brings you into contact with another period in your life when this attachment to furniture had spontaneously ex isted."

Naturally, the period to which Iturria alludes to here is that of his childhood. But what he brings to our attention here is of great importance: the physical journey there and back, from Montevideo to Spain and then the return to Monte video, couples with the internal journey, made through the memory which gives rise to the reunion - at the same time close and different - with that which is most familiar.

Here some of the psychoanalytic categories and terminology developed by Sigmund Freud can be very helpful. For example, it would help us to understand, in the first place, that Ignacio Iturria is a painter "of interiors", in a do uble sense of the term - over determined. His works always place us inside the house, the family home. This is true even when we are taken outside - even with buil dings, trains, boats and planes the house is, simultaneously, the house of the memor y.

Consequently it can be affirmed, as Damián Bayón so perceptively pointed out (1994), that the key to his work is an "essential intimacy", and this is what gives his work expressive continuity independent of his different m odulations and supports.

Furthermore, the process mentioned above of returning from another world to what is fami liar; in space and time, tinges Iturria's universe with a spectral dimension. At one and the same time nostalgic and umbrageous, this leads us to a perception of his objects and places as somewhat sinister. Freud comments that the appearance of something as baleful occurs when something common place and familiar unexpectedly becomes unusual and distant.

The presentation of the most familiar objects and places from an unusual and unexpected perspective is a recurrent feature in Iturria's work, where, consequently, a certain aura, a certain sinis ter connotation can frequently be perceiv ed. This carries us off to the most distant lands of the ima gination and the memory. It is as if one piece, without even knowing precisely for what reason, somehow did not quite fit in the normal order of things.

But, however, in this back and forth of the memory - something akin to the ebb and flow of the tide - the drama always remains within bounds, the situation never drifts towards the rending of the heart. This is because - even though the y are at the same time a long way off from any kind of self-satisfying sentimentalism - all the characters, objects and situations in Ignacio Iturria's painting possess a certain tenderness.

It is this aspect of Iturria's work that sets his plastic universe at a considerable distance from the hopeless, nihilistic world of Juan Carlos Onetti. At the same time as he monopolises us and sur prises us with his aura of the unusua l - with his unexpected turns - Iturria's painting fills us with a renovating energy, with a surprising self-confidence.

At bottom, this is about a recovery, about a return to the childhood dream of omnipotence through memory and imagination. In spite of the fact that this also leads to the child's attainment of -self-sufficiency and, consequentl~ his enc losure within a private solipsistic domain, with Iturria the -illusion of being capable of everything in the play of his painting is configured as a form of sharing and even offering. A fundamental element here is the idea of respect, of consideration for others always through the medium of painting.

Iturria explicitly talks of the need for hope and faith. This is not just in a religious sense, since it is a hope that things will improve, a faith in the fact that what is truly positive will end up winning through. Naturally, these facets are applied fundamentally to the commitment to the work itself. Any artist who does not fully believe in himself and what he does, will have difficulty in expressing anything important at all. What stands out in Iturria is conviction i n the work itself, the persistent belief in the value of the job in hand. In this sense, Iturria himself relates himself to the example of Pablo Picasso.

Here, one would really have to refer to the idea of a utopia, which, as Ernst Bloch pointed out, always has its starting point in the darkest and most hopeless territory. One would have to refer to the utopia of a persistency of infancy in art, in spite of the compulsive, and later calm, assump tion of maturity. From this utopia one continues in the state of childhood, and is capable of questio ning the normal order of things. This is because any utopia, apart from being t he fantasy of a nowhere, is primarily the negation of what exists, a rejection of the established world.

With the accuracy of a detail that fixes their smallest gestures and grimaces, the inhabitants of this nowhere land seem to float in a dream - or, to be more precise, in a daydream. Although it might be true to say that some of his figu res remind us of nightmares and distressing dreams, Iturria's cha racters are related more to the day dreamer, to the daily fantasy that plays such a decisive role in the attitude of rebels, nonconformists, poets and philosophers. This is because t he daydream comes directly from our surprise before the world, from the question that asks why things are, instead of not being, from the question about why things are like they are and not some other way.

Even though Iturria's figures sometimes appear to fall, they eventually always rise, ascend. In this way they embody an ascending dynamic, of utopia, of hope in themselves and in everyone else. This occurs even though the starting point of their movement is nearly always an experience of perplexing solitude.

With the dimension of time, the aesthetic retention of the moment of fullness or uncertainty, expressed in the work as an active and constant present plays a fundamental role. The characters emerge from the world of the game, in the ebb of the memory, infinitely developed in paintings and objects. In the play of painting, anything is possible, with the same pieces of the memory retained since infancy, and subjected to the endless turning of the metamorphosis of the imagination. < /P>

In the Iturrian universe anything is possible. Objects become lifelike and adopt animal forms. The little men with surprised faces could become birds or elephants, while the small animals could easily turn into intelligent beings , blessed with an understanding of the human condition. The small soldiers turn into signs of the mystery and of the loneliness of the game, and the plastic or rubber toy cyclists, painted in bright colours, (or even their mere shadow) run a race with us, a test where the goal is infinite like that in the game of pitch-and-toss.

The incorporative protoplasm of the American

But we are now going to turn again to the many different factors that overdetermine the form of expression found in the plastic universe proper to Ignacio Iturria's work. That he is a Uruguayan, Latin-American artist implies that his wo rk will incorporate a complex network of synthesis, of intertwining.

With his profound knowledge of universal art, Angel Kalenberg sustains that the dynamic of art in Latin America is characterised by an ability to appropriate all the forms generated in other cul tures but, in the process, changin g and subverting their meanings. This dynamic of subversive appro priation is coexistent with the process of the formation of a language particular to Ignacio Iturria.

The first link is associated with the figure of his father, who, in this case transmitted the myt hic image, as a narrative in the transcendental sense, of the family routes fused with the use of pain ting as his best and most im portant means of expression. Iturria himself (1995, 29) remembered this when he was asked about his first contacts with painting: "We used to live in a two storey house in El Cordón with a central courtyard with a skylight. My father had painted hi s ancestors and scenes from the Basque country on the walls. That was my first impression".

As painting, in its origins, was a European art, Iturria decided to travel to Europe, to Spain. The journey in pursuit of painting was fused with that in pursuit of the family, and possibly also with the expedition seeking Spanish cultu re of the twentieth century - here the figure of the great poet Antonio Machado was superimposed over that of his father. It is somewhat curious, however, that instead of establishing himself in the Basque Country - the land of his ancestors - Iturria cho se Cadaques in Catalonia, where he was to live between 1977 and 1985.

In that beautiful town of Cabo de Creus - which also attracted some of the most significant perso nalities of the twentieth-century world of art, such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp, to name but three of many - Iturr ia bathed in the light of the Mediterranean. By all accounts, it appears that this was an extremely happy period for Iturria, where everything was simple, a type of small paradise.

The intense glorification of white, in the phase of Iturria's painting that spans from the 1 970s to the 1 980s, conveys better than anything else this sense of well-being. In this white mirror of purity and transparency - a refl ection of the intense light of the Mediterranean - we find the female figure: the configuration of the wife and the mother occupy a central role in his work from this period. But, in spite of the great differences in style and meaning between the language used during this period and that which was to form in his mature years, at this point there are two aspects present in his work that would also become decisive in his later development: the great skill he displayed in his handling of the geometrical stru cturation of space and the importance he placed in the solitude of his characters.

In the years that immediately followed, Iturria appropriated the Spanish pictorial tradition and, logically, established relations with contemporary artists. The group Dau al Set and the, for me, map -propriately named Informa lismo became essential references in his work. I mention that Informa/ismo has always seemed to me to be a category that is theoretically and critically inconsistent, because under no circumstances does the absence of figuration imply an absence of fo rm. Whatever the case may be, the mark and the presence - integrated and transcendental - of Antoni Ta pies or Antonio Saura, among others, are undoubtedly present during this initial period in Ignacio Iturria's work. These influences would always be pres ent in the future too, operating as a background to his work.

We would have to wait, however; until his return to Montevideo for Iturria to fully develop his own language, his expressive maturity. It is a synthesis that comes out of a contrast - the contrast bet ween Cadaques and Montevideo, the l uminosity of the Mediterranean and the heavy, filtered diffuse light of the Uruguayan capital.

If the journey to Spain represented a return to origins, Iturria carried Uruguay with him, in his subconscious: "The Mediterranean has a luminous tradition, it is a very different concept to ours. I see Uruguay as part of a more commonp lace thing, something more sober; less luminous. The brown sea is somehow present in the subconscious" (Iturria, 1995, 31). This brings to mind, once again, the dense, dark chromaticism in the narratives of Juan Carlos Onetti, as well as his piercing iron y and his intense sense of humour.

I have perceived this feature - the presence of a sense of humour; an irony that before anyt hing is applied to oneself - as an aspect characteristic of Uruguayan culture. It appears in Iturria's work over and over again in the expressi ons of surprise and in the ridiculous situations in which his characters find themselves involved. It transmits an existential condition that seems to come from a necessary settling of scores with every kind of grandiloquent rhetoric, and it is something which con servative nationalism has transformed into habitual practice in Latin America.

On the other hand, with Iturria, the love of simple things is blunted. There is that antihero from Rio de Ia Plata, for example, the bailiff Ulises Perez. This is a character that Iturria took from a novel by the contemporary Uruguayan writer Napoleen Baccino Ponce de León, Un amor en Bangkok (1994). Ulises Perez is a loser who has to hide in the bathroom to smoke a cigarette "like Humphrey Bogart", because it is something that his family and colleagues have forbidd en him to do after having suffered his second stroke.

The journey, both physical and mental, the outgoing and return journey between America and Europe is a recurrent feature in the very different aspects of Latin American art. It favours its ten dency to hybridisation, the energy of its m iscegenation, its capacity for universalising integration. It is what the great Jose Lezama Lima (1957,183) called "that voracity, that incorporative protoplasm of the American".

It is a characteristic feature of Uruguayan artists and began with its pioneer, that magnificent self-taught painter of the nineteenth century Juan Manuel Blanes (1830-1901), who was responsible for the plastic tradition of Uruguay. The journey there and back also has an important purpose for the three most significant names in Uruguayan art of the first half of the twentieth century: Pedro Figari (1861-1938), Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874-1949) and Rafael Barradas (1890-1929), these last two having particularly close links with Spain.

I have always avoided like the plague that banal critical language that tries to explain a particular artist's work in relation to the influences on them. But, on the other hand, I believe that it is important to identify the process of continuity in forms that allows us to appreciate how an artist fuses his own lan guage with that of received tradition, to that which is completely faithful only when he transcends it.

If Iturria's work does not speak in this underground dialogue, at least until now, with that of Rafael Barradas, his communication with Figari and with Torres-Garcia is quite significant. In relation to the latter, it is important to lo cate the transposition of his constructive structure, something that is revealed in the interior order of the articulation of space that characterises all of Iturria's work.

And, perhaps, in another aspect that, at first sight, is less evident. I am referring to the expres sive proliferation that is found in Iturria's work, that impulse to paint everything, to make use of any medium - itself an echo of a ce rtain horror vacui, and of the fear of the disintegration that this would bring with it - and of that accumulation of images in Torres-Garcia's constructive grid, that seems to eliminate plastic emptiness as a mere sign of tiredness or distraction.

When speaking of Iturria, we are dealing with a fairly central question that is noticeable not only in his works but also upon entering his studio. Iturria has pointed out that a painting standing on its own becomes isolated, decontextu alised from the universe to which it belongs. On the other hand, the purely coincidental mounting up and superimposition of works in the studio gives rise to an interactive game between the paintings and the artist, who, at this point, becomes a spectator surprised by his own work. Piled up together one top of the other like this, the paintings reveal unu sual fragments that, at the same time, unleash ideas for new works. Here empty walls, canvases, pieces of wood, cardboard, or papers do not exist . Everything is occupied by the expansive, appro priative gesture of painting.

This painter's workshop, configured for colouring in, excess and accumulation, is equally a sign of the desire not to lose anything, to keep everything, to collect. It is a sign of a (yearned for) world without loss, an ex pression of the utopian desire for endless integration and accumulation, and this is something that, once again, takes us back to childhood, to the child's desire to appropriate and con serve everything that surrounds him. Iturria once spoke (1995, 35) of the "provocative disorder" of his studio. What is provocative, is that personal incitement to create that is shown in the expansive conti nuity of his work. But all of this is also a mark of his character; of his open and active generosity which accumula tes with his works, possessions and objects and which is respectful towards people.

The dialogue with the work of Pedro Figari is of another kind. Contrary to the open spaces that are so characteristic of Pedro Figari's work, Iturria's painting is, as I have already pointed out, in a number of convergent senses, a pain ting of interiors, and, what is more, that almost exclusively tre ats of urban topics: houses, buildings, means of transport, interiors and domestic objects, toys ... The use of colour is also quite different in both painters.

 Despite this, however, there is a certain assimilative intercommunication between the two in _the way in which they put together their scenes and the way in which they construct their characters. Figari's characters always appear as actors in some form of ritual or an existential drama, and those of Iturria form part of a plot woven together out of the memory and the imagination. Furthermore, the open pampas-covered landscape and the figure that is so close to the solitary animal, both of which are so important in "Iturria's world", can also be found in Figari.

But I would like to draw attention to yet another facet of "that incorporative voracity of the -American" described by Lezama Lima, because this is clearly revealed in Iturria, with his universal abi lity to integrate. I would make refe rence here not so much to a continuity of forms as to a corres pondence in the image, echoing Lezama Lima once again, but this time referring to a different aspect of his thought.

I am referring to that internal harmony that exists between literary, musical or artistic works, where there is strong evidence of analogies between them that goes beyond the cultural differences of time and space. This occurs without t he existence of any previous mutual knowledge. It is a con gruity in the image like the area of modulation in the deepest dimensions of thought, sensibility and human representation.

In this area, I find a clear resonance between Ignacio Iturria and the work of Franz Kafka. The banal adjective "kafkaesque" does not really do justice to the writer. In front of a more topical vision, in addition to the profound traged y in his writing, there is in his work a tenderness and a humour in the sense of sharing. This is what allows us to establish a significant link between Kafka and the plas tic world of Ignacio Iturria.

In 1917-18, Franz Kafka made a series of notes and meditations which were posthumously edited and published as Considerations upon sin, pain, hope and the path to truth. In these medita F tions we read: "The road is infinite, the re is nothing to be removed and nothing to add, but, howe ver, each person still adds their own criteria from childhood" (Kafka, 1917-18, 33).

Kafka's life and work is characterised by a will to uphold and maintain the ideals and requisites that we have as children. In most cases this posture is abandoned upon becoming an adult as a way of becoming realists and a ccepting the need for a pragmatic response to reality. A child, however; is demanding and vehemently rejects lies.

Kafka's child is he who establishes this solid self-demanding nature, and this can be found in his life and works. It resounds intensely and accusingly in the terrible 'Letter to Father' or in 'The Judgement'. Kafka always looked on the world through the eyes of a child. An entry for 24 December 1911 in his Diaries reads: "As a child I was anxious, and if not anxious then uneasy, when my father spoke - as he often did, since he was a businessman - of 'the end of the month' or 'la st few days'). ... [T]he expression 'the end of the month' remained a disquieting mystery for me, to be joined later (the result of having listened more attentively) by the expression 'last few days', even if the lat ter expression did not have the same g reat significance" (Kafka, 1910-1923,1,180).

The persistence of childish standards, as a way of looking at and measuring the world, of defini tively insisting in the face of adult conformism can be found in the heart of the metamorphoses, of the transpositions that take pla ce in the small human beings and little animals that populate Kafka's literary universe: dogs, insects, mice, monkeys ... In these small mirrors a critical gaze reveals the falseness, arro gance and destructive nature of human passions. But this is done w ithout sentimentalism. At the same time there is an identifiable stance of compassion in the most profound sense of the word, with an awareness of the notion that what truly unites us as human beings is the experience of shared suffering.

Although coming from a different source, and also from a different context, Ignacio Iturria's work is also touched by a similar sense of compassion, which is not only directed at people but also at the animals and objects that ap pear in his work. His work operates on the margins of a poetic of the small, of the negligible. The subtle dimensions of this poetic lead us to the spaces where an aesthetic of levity can be found, and these areas constitute one of th e most important features of modern art. It is an art where there is gradually less and less space afforded to the solemn or the pre tentious with all the notions of authoritarianism that these features carry.

Iturria's characters are beings and objects that have been made small by the workings of the memory and the imagination. The men are always "little men" and the women always "little women". These, on the other hand, are always contraste d with the enormous dimensions, out of all scale, of the objects. This is clearly the result of maintaining a child's gaze using the painting as eyes, since for children objects are always bigger, enlarged in reference to their own bodies.

A child is also capable of seeing things from a different angle and perspective - a way of seeing that is impossible once we become adults. Iturria himself points this out when he says: "Nowadays we see the table from above, but when yo u were a child you saw it from below and underneath it there was a whole world, a whole visual world" (1995, 32).

There is, furthermore, another aspect to be taken into account since it provides an interesting insight. This can be found in Joaquín Torres-García's beautiful illustrated manuscript, published in 1941, The city without a name. Here we read: "I am walking around the city. Its perspective does not correspond to that of other cities. It is necessary to modify the dimensions. What, in other cities is wide, is tall here. This makes it more shady". This city with no name, where tall buildings are predo minantly more numerous than wide ones is a clear reference to Montevideo.

Apart from the reference to a gloomy, dark chromaticism - which, as I have already pointed out, also figures in Iturria's work - Torres-Garcia's constructive vision draws our attention to another central characteristic of the Uruguayan capital: its elevation. Walking around Montevideo one's atten tion is immediately drawn to the fact that the old buildings are unusually tall, reaching some four or five metres. This is borne out by the fact that in current rehabilitation, it is quite usu al to make two flats out of one of these older houses.

As a child, Ignacio Iturria's family home was indeed one of tnese large old rambling buildings that had been converted into a smaller tenement house. For this reason, the size of the rooms and the height of the ceilings, both of which c ontribute a spatial configuration so characteristic of his painting, must also be related to this singular childhood experience.

In this enormous disproportionate play area, the child identifies with small objects and toys, small like him. Furniture becomes the relief of the dream landscape - mountains to be explored or places to hide and seek refuge, above all f rom the adult gaze. The pieces in the game are not only conferred with their proper form but they also experience the metamorphoses of the imagination. Here, we find a new parallel with Kafka: "when you are a child, you live a lot within the home, pla yin g with toy soldiers and different things to be found among the furniture, they could become dino saurs, you could turn them into strange creatures, you could play under the table" (Iturria, 1995, 32).

This game, solitary and engrossing, is not inane. With it, the child experiences his first risks, the continuous threat of falling, of failure or pain. This means that, in Iturria's work, where tenderness occupies an extremely important place, there is never a sense of "sloppiness" or "sentimentality". In fact, the game, its recovery in the memory, to live and to paint, is taken seriousl~ with all its difficulties.

In what was edited as part one of Kafka's Meditation, we read: "The true road lies along a rope that has not been strung out at a great height, but just above floor level. It seems that it has been designed more to trip a person up than to enable him to walk along it" (Kafka, 1917-18, 30). The edge of childish exigency is always sharp and merciless. In the game we give everything and we risk all. Our life is on the line. Everything is in the balance, and we slip repeatedly towards the a byss. We leap into emptiness, always about to fall, shipwrecked in the bottle, strung up on the wire.

Who am I?

In Iturria's painting, apart from the play of the imagination, the other great creative power is the memory. A unifying force for recollections - always fragmentary and evanescent - the memory cons tructs a framework, a type of s pider's web, that leads to a background of everything that is lived as experience - present and future - and is fixed in the space of representation. This is not just to be seen but also to be remembered.

This space gives rise to the central question that, to a greater or lesser extent, everyone asks themselves, and that forms a constituent part of Ignacio Iturria's art. It is the question of questions: Who am I? The questioning o f identity.

In the very earliest moments, it is the family framework: I am the family. That is where I come from, what I constitute, where I stem from. The individual is indeed a piece: unique, a link in a chain of blood relations with affin ity, that gradually give form to the central experiences of life - birth, scho ol adolescence, marriage, having children, grandchildren, death. This forms a vital circle like the cir cularity of existence, like the permanence of being set against the back ground of becoming.

Later come the countries and the histories, the human displacements and the will to put down roots, to settle down. In the case of Iturria, Spain represents the background, an origin that, following the journey of his father, is continu ed in Uruguay. It is only with his return that the son who has travelled to his father's country of origin closes the circle of life through time. I am Uruguay because I am Spain. It is for this reason that the journey, the nomadism o nly definitively comes to an end in Uruguay.

Finally, on a third level, I am the convulsive history of Latin America and of Spain as root and memory. The history of the patricidal wars, dictatorships, human suffering, violent deaths, disappearances. Those who are no longer here, live on in the memory. It is through their death that the regeneration of life is brought about. Thus, life and death have a fluid continuity on earth.

This existential dimension bestows Iturria's painting with a sense of transcendence and commitment which I consider to be extremely important. The characters in his paintings and painted objects - solitary or members of a collective uni verse - always pose the question of identity, between individuality and anonymity.

In the group paintings, we find a formal procedure that is something akin to the pictorial recreation of a mosaic. The canvas is filled with small pieces, like mosaics, whose missing parts or holes suggest an unfinished effect, that imp ossibility of finishing or completing the work. At the same time, the individual pieces integrate with the whole. One and all comprise a unit which is, at the same time, a sign of collective identity and of anonymity.

In addition to this, these pictorial mosaics are also a register on the canvas of the trace and the aura of the photograph, in its personal dimension - the portrait. The passport photograph or the pho tograph in the family album. For th is reason, seen in the present, the images adopt a subdued colour, grey or brown, equal to that which the passing of time prints on old photographs. It is the same colour that the filter of the memory imposes on past remembrances.

All of this forms a framework, an imaginary spider's web. The lines which unite the small ima ges-photographs - formed either by shading with paint or the scraping effect of the palette knife - form a reticle. This is a structure that i s impossible to perceive from the self-sufficient monadic solitu de of each character, but visible, however to an external spectator.

The effect of the passing of time on the images of the people is yet further accentuated with the superimposition on the mosaic of portraits of shades and silhouettes of the non-human in the vicinity, a vestige of lived experience, that experience that accompanies us and filters the memories of others. In Iturria, these shades are the same as his childhood universe of his games and daydreams: elephants, zebras, sofas, planes...

In this way, his paintings become sets of small votive engravings of the past, in ex-voto, that invoke the others. They invoke the near and the ones we never knew, but they share fully with us the joys, sufferings and desires - the expe rience of humanity.

Both the paintings and the objects - tables and bedside tables with portraits, shadows and gaps - should be viewed as elements on an altar, or even altars themselves that, in our present, serve the function of evoking the rest, t hose who live near us and those who have already gone, in the common human condition.

But this register springs from the earliest sources of art, from its function as an invocation of the dead, disappeared and absent. This was a function that in the classical dawn of the ancient Greek world would gradually open up the wa y for the emancipation of plastic form, to the independence of representation, the artistic image in regard to ritual.

The truth is that, in its background, this derivation from ritual - from the ceremony of the evo cation of the other, that is also our double - continues operating actively in the art that is in greater demand, and in a particularly mar ked and relevant way in the work of Ignacio Iturria.

Reaching up to heaven

There are many images and elements that underline this ritual conception of painting that can be found in Iturria. For him, painting is a ceremonial form. The canvas is identified with the heavens and, in front of this, the paint er like a praying figure, lifts up his arms to give way to the appearance of the forms.

A painterls work does not only require technique and, of course, concentration and commitment. It also demands preparation, and an adequate physical and mental attitude towards the act of painting which presupposes an isolation f rom any interference from the outside world, from any possible form of interference or distraction. This notion of "shutting oneself up in the act of painting", which is so cha racteristic of Iturria - who has no concept of time while he works -,is quite reminiscent of, and close to, the form of privation that is practised, for example, the fasting that is the preparation for so many rituals.

Iturria says that, as with playing football, he does not paint as well on a full stomach. In this way it is not unusual for him to go for many hours working without food. Football, for which Iturria is a great enthusiast, is not just a game, but a game that is particularly ritualised. This is especially true when the game is played with friends and colleagues, with whom one experiences, as with any form of ritual, that profound sense of sharing.

Therefore, in Iturria, there is a very close link between the act of painting and a unitary circle of senses, brought together by prayer, ritual and game. The most intense visual and expressive anagram of this circular lin k is the figure of the painter represented in a white shirt with his arms reaching skywards. It is clearly a self-portrait. But, with reference to the continuity of images that I spoke of earlier; at the same time this figure takes us directly to the cent ral character in Francisco Goya&acute;s The Shootings of 3 May 1808.

This continuity of images shows not only the persistence and appropriation of the Spanish pic torial tradition in Ignacie Iturria's work, but also - what I would like to turn to now - the parallelism that is thus made explicit between t he sacrificial dimension in his painting and that other gesture of man when faced with death, standing before the firing squad awaiting the impact of the bullets. In this way the painting appears as a way of giving itself up, to the rest and for th e rest, as a ceremonial form of sacrifice. The painter becomes a new Christ who sustains all humanity on a cross with his arms.

In addition to this, it is something related with the religious aspect - quite profound, even -though there is no logical reason why it has to appear in a superficially explicit form - that is so cha racteristic of all of Iturria's work . Commenting about his fascination with the form of aeroplanes, that can be seen flying all over the skies of his paintings, Iturria told me: "All things considered, a plane is just a cross", immediately adding, "and what's more, it is in the sky".

In itself, this cross is the symbol of a sacrifice, nothing less than the sacrifice of God in human form made to redeem the human race from its sin after the Fall. The painter in the white shirt with his arm raised towards heaven forms the sign of a cross. He is trying to speak to heaven on behalf of all the human beings that live on earth.

The painter; a solitary individual, who climbs up to the roof on the top floor of the school and 7 holds up his arms to the heavens, ends up as the best definition of the game that Iturria proposes we consider. In the end it is about the game of solitude.

The sensation of melancholy, or even despondency, that some of Iturria's paintings produce - in spite of their idealistic attempt to uplift, of his backing of the human being - has something to do with the role that solitude play s in his work.

In an attempt to rise or lift themselves up, the hanging or balancing characters are alone. The desolate, depopulated interiors - through the absence of human form - quite dramatically transmit the experience of solitude. Not to mention the characters inside the bottles who, with their gaze, make us feel like we are inside this translucent interior with them, where there is no possible way out. The first of these figures is Iturria himself.

These bottles carry with them the message of the shipwreck, lost in the remotest island of the &frac12; memory and of time. It is a message that can be fused with the character itself, bottled up and barely visible. The emergent lit tle men or women inscribed in the bottle, with their cry for help made through their perplexed gaze, trying to escape that irreparable solitude, with a grimace of irrepressible anguish.

The decisive issue is that the very suffering that people find difficult to support is precisely what constitutes the deepest dimension in the creative capacity of the human individual, whatever dimension of thought or art this is manif ested in. As I have already pointed out elsewhere, art is one of the supreme forms for an apprenticeship in solitude.

Therefore, this is something that an artist has to accept, almost as given, in the process of maturing. With his habit of isolating himself in games from his childhood, of going, according to his own explanation to his mother "to my thi ngs" (1995, 29), Iturria locates " a very important prin ciple for finding oneself, which is the most substantial element required to work, because at the end of the day solitude is a constant."

The truth is that, once adults, very few human beings know how to play, because very few know and accept being alone. This is where the greatness of art lies - in allowing us to establish a thread of communication between our childish ability for play and its prolongation into the univer se of the adult, of the imagination and the memory. Those who do not know how to be alone with themselves are those who do not know how to play.

What for a child is spontaneous, nearly always represents for an adult an arduous pro cess of conquest, a tortuous route that demands one to break with the productive calculating men tality. Only the most open of minds is able to propag ate the utopia of play - a glimpse of that territory that is not marked out by the rigid norms of the "reality principle" - to search for that "oasis of hap piness" (Fink, 1957) that turns the act of living into a creative exercise.

Nobody said it was going to be easy or simple. The worst scenario is that of the idiot who believes he lives in the best of all possible worlds, in a world that does not need change. Iturria's cha racters convey that dissatisfaction tha t is inherent in human beings, the desire to improve, to move on in life's adventure. And they do this playing, taking the game very seriously, which is something that reaches its apotheosis in painting because there everything is possible. There, any ide a, even the most peculiar, can take shape, is made possible, "we see it" with our own eyes.

What we are concerned with here, in the end, is playing together, to truly learn how to share, which is something that only children are able to do. This, which constitutes the heart of Ignacio Iturria's plastic universe, is the most difficult. It carries the most risks with it, because being capable of sharing or playing with others implies the precondition of knowing how to be alone with oneself. To learn, in the end, from the crucial situations in one's life: birth, love, deat h, we are inevitably alone.

References

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