NICO MUNUERA: FANUM NATURAE | CASI SOLO AZUL

April 22 - June 24, 2022

Fanum Naturae | almost only blue

In 1460 the shõgun Ashikaga Yoshimasa planned the construction of a pavilion surrounded by a large garden to serve as his retreat; a place dedicated to the interiorization and perception of beauty, where man's relationship with nature would be one of veneration and gratitude. This construction was supposed to be covered in silver, thus emulating another temple built years ago by his grandfather, which was informally known as the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, or Golden Pavilion. But due to various conflicts of the time, and despite the building having been completed, it was never covered in silver as initially planned. Today it is a Buddhist temple with its wooden construction totally exposed. There is no hint of the initial intention of being wrapped in silver. However, since the Edo Period it is known as Ginkaku which means "Silver Pavilion”.

A few months ago, I started a series of works focused on silver pigment, motivated by the mental image of this temple surrounded by an oriental garden. I imagined the fluidity of silver dressing a beautiful construction in the middle of an environment designed for enjoyment, meditation and communion with nature. I just started painting, like so many other times. In the process of which I learned of the characteristics of silver on canvas and its behavior, other pigments began to bloom. Secondary nuances that had more and more prominence. And so, when the weeks went, between all the nuances, the blue showed up.

To be honest, I have always tried to avoid blue. The reason has been none other than a personal prejudice derived from a simplistic reading of the painting. The relationship of fluidity and the color blue, provoke a first perception of the seascape and the sky that I have always wanted to prevent. A sight of the sea, on the other hand, outside the studio - I have had it tattooed in my eyes for years.

On the island of Ibiza, from a very specific point, the observation of the inexhaustible tremulation of the sea, has become my particular tantra. A meditation established in the vision of the minimum, a minimum in constant movement. A place, where the succession of consecutive moments impossible to retain, invites reason to flourish the certainty of the unattainable in a constant calm of uncertainty. A place where I find the pure awareness of time's shape.

Although my relationship with landscape seems obvious to many people, I identify myself more accurately with nature, a much more internal concept and mostly not visible to the naked eye. What we call landscape is, for me, an accumulation of innumerable elements interacting with each other creating a visible surface. This visual conglomerate is really made of multiple elements building themselves, individually and internally. Atmospheric, geological, and vegetal elements which don't constitute landscape by themselves in isolation. Starting from this very idea of nature, as a movement and internal construct, I try to make my painting, my movement on canvas and the flow of ink on paper, behave as one of those minimal elements that belong to the landscape. I try to meet with the painting as we both become one.

I don't have a concept of painting as a representation of an outer space. In my case, the act of painting is the place. A place of active interiorization. The impulse comes from an internal movement whose immediate consequence is an external physical manifestation. Something similar to sap, constantly flowing and pushing a plant, creating a visible outer shape.

In this period of time that I have called Fanum naturae | almost only blue, the process, as it usually happens in painting, becomes one of learning and encounter. Almost as if it were a face-to-face confrontation with an enemy who was always with me, the encounter with blue has appeared irretrievably. I also admit that in these paintings, my interest in thinking about the importance of water in my work has returned. A continuously present water, which I am aware of, constitutes all my painting.

This exhibition, after all, is nothing more than a sample of sectioned time. Fragments of time that have been lived in the studio, that somehow contain the intensity and lightness of a beauty that escapes from the hands and floats in an intuitive understanding. An intuition and succession of circumstances, which after a period of four years of absence, is able to emerge and define a singular period.

And so, it is, that a small painting that was isolated by its peculiar color somewhat different from all the others, now, it crosses an ocean and says, whispering, “almost only blue”.

- Nico Munuera, April 2022

Fanum Naturae | almost only blue

My arguments for writing about this exhibition by Nico Munuera, called Fanum Naturae / almost only blue, seem commonplace. Explaining them once was not enough - it never is. That his work is poetry and precision is a fact that must be verified in front of the paintings. It always produces aesthetic enjoyment to contemplate them in situ; his presentation of the landscape avoids mimesis. The artist transcends that limitation of pictorial genre. Rather, he evokes the sublime and the infinite. Painting is also a stronghold of learning and freedom: a parapet made up of very fine layers: the support, the primer, the thinner, the binder and the pigments. Water, an ingredient in the primordial soup, also dissolves and is part of the medium. The acrylic dispersion, perfectly homogeneous, spreads over the edges of the support and colors where it falls.

“The water soaks the earth and the sky

The flow suddenly stops

It flows again according to the direction of the waves.”

Nico shares with the Zen Buddhist thinking the concept of the absolute dimension, the need to encompass the entire universe from his workshop. Enclosed, alert, conscious, he stops rational thought and lets the other one; he adds water to the paint, beats the sea blue current and presents his visions of the waves with a gesture. In the last line of the previous poem, the synthesis appears, the liberation of the poetic voice, the freedom to float with the waves. This is how mood happens in the water.

Fanum Naturae/ Almost Only Blue is a collection of states of the soul, understood as Juan-Eduardo Cirlot defines in his dictionary the landscapes that: “arise to explain moments in which certain different influences are superimposed in a variable degree of mixture and combination.” The poet poses it as an analogy, where the landscape is adopted by the spirit of whoever contemplates it, "by virtue of the qualities that it possesses in itself and that are the same as the subject." Thus, these paintings contain the truth that caused them, the image of water and its imprint, the relief that comes from painting every day or the very stratigraphy of the earth's crust. I believe that the identification of life with the pictorial process precipitates emotions within the painting, wet on wet, entwined with restlessness or desire. We have read his handwritten annotations on some graphic work, where he explained the meaning of the stains objectively, scientifically, as in Humboldt's Naturgemälde, avoiding giving symbolic values to numbers or colors. Moving illusion and impossible measure. Goethe distinguished, in his Theory of Colors, between symbolic color and allegorical color, the one in line with Nature and the one that needs prior knowledge of the sign to have a meaning. It was based on the belief in the direct, unmediated effect of color on feelings and the brain. The arbitrary chromatic schemes, which throughout history tried to establish moral values and psychological nuances to color, have in common certain associations with the darkest, ultramarine or Prussian blue, which link it to divinity, to order of the sacred, to the depth of the transcendent and the color silver to redemption. They are the two opposite poles in our painter's palette.

It was a Chinese cultural tradition to give more importance to the landscape than to man, the figure, before the macrocosm than the microcosm. Cirlot quotes the poet Kouo-Hi:

"If the superior man loves the landscape, what is the reason? Hills and gardens are places that will always be frequented by those who seek to cultivate their original nature; the fountains and rocks give constant joy to those who walk around whistling...”

This collection of paintings is a consequence of traveling and staying. The choice of place causes an indefinite, subjective affinity, which makes one return to that state, isolated, as if on an island. This is how it has been physically for years. They are accessible formats with the back bent, to be able to be painted with wide movements, to the scale of his body, from the bottom to the surface. Emerged and built in layers, like mica and plaster, in luminous silvers and frozen blues. A curiosity about Stratigraphy (from the Latin stratum, 'bed', and from the Greek γραφή [graphḗ], 'writing'): it is the branch of Geology that deals with the study and interpretation, identification and description of sedimentary rocks. This science is used to draw a geological map, a complex task that requires: spatial vision and knowledge of geometry, knowing how to relate a sequence of arranged events, showing the four space-time dimensions and capturing everything on a two-dimensional support, on half a ream of paper. Charting time and other impossibilities like how to make a stratigraphic section of the sea? How to present a boiling wave and an icy bed of silvery shells, all at the same time? Nico has made EVERYTHING visible by painting this series.

- Juan Canales, Ph. D., Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, April 2022, translated from Spanish by K. Griffin and M. Canales