the street is our gallery

May 25, 2017 to July 23, 2017

The “el jardín del kaos” (garden of kaos) exhibition, specifically designed for the Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente, marks the reconsideration of the codes operability of Okuda San Miguel‘s urban proposal within the boundaries of an institutionalized space. The starting point for this project is a dialogue analysis between light and darkness as a structure that sustains the representation of what is real. One half of the artist’s proposal focuses on daytime and its ways of figurative representation, while the other half takes us to the complex boundaries of the nocturnal and its abstract symbolization.

(Daytime)

Most of Okuda‘s work has been developed in unforeseen spaces, something that has to do with his intention to reveal new meanings to the hidden architectural elements in the city’s everyday life. Throughout his career he has defined an iconographic repertoire with unique human and animal characters, sometimes hybrids between them, whose appearances are determined by a polyhedric skin structured by chromatic combinations. This examination formalizes itself, among other plastic strategies, by luminous compositions modulated by the sensuality of color. This is how the Daytime part of his installation in the CEART unfolds, with textiles and flexible materials that invites the viewer to step into a chaotic and hedonistic territory that is both intuitive and astounding, indebted to an impure beauty that escapes the control of the canons and storms the streets of every great city. Flags, organic forms, voluptuous bodies and geometric rhythm compose a cartography for the imagination capable of imposing itself in front of a present time that is controlled by dissent and the negation of the citizens’ social and vital needs.

(NightTime)

The city lights, those vibrant glares that are fundamental in Okuda‘s work, find its backdrop in the iconographic hermeticism of the abstract and in nature’s metaphoric power. His incursion in the enigmatic and oneiric realms of the night allows him to delve into the magnitude of absence, of those things we wish to see but cannot reach to contemplate. In that sense, the Night Time part of the installation has Kaos Star as its leading element. This iconographic emblem of the artist, configured by a multicolored kaleidoscopic star in a continuous state of expansion, seems to reivindicate the uncertainty and doubt as essential conditions to be conscious of our own paths. Complementing this, a set of mirrors capable of a mixture of reality and phantasmagoria in the eyes of the viewer, work in this exhibition as a scenic device that brings endless possible itineraries. This installation aims then to create an interactive environment capable of working as an interface between the viewer, the unexplored zones of our reality and the contradictions that determine our desire for knowledge. CARLOS DELGADO MAYORDOMO