Luis Úrculo
Bugatti Veyron, Chevrolet Bel Air, Lancia Astura (Learning from Karaoke)
“Stop reading these characters. The twenty-nine of them (including spaces) that your eyes have registered before the first full stop are enough. The precise substance, the indicated object to get immersed in this exhibition, is in your hands, you just have to stop doing whatever you are doing and start to manipulate the piece of paper, start transforming it partially into something else: simple and imperfect spheres – immediate sculptures – are welcome. Above all, in the meantime: Doubt the information!”
Víctor Palacios
Galería Max Estrella has the pleasure to present Luis Úrculo’s first solo project at our space thanks an exhibition that, as his artistic corpus suggests, shows works made using different formats, which are apparently dissimilar and unrelated, such as videos, drawings, acoustic pieces or actions with objects.
Exactly, “… (Learning from Karaoke)” is the tangible and artistic result of an intimate analysis, even domestic, orchestrated by the memories and experiences of the artist. The exhibition explores the morphology and phenomenology that underlies each work and, at the same time, scrutinizes the behaviour of the materials that form them.
Following up the words of the curator Víctor Palacios: “The work of Luis Úrculo can be compared to what in botany is known as concrescence. The different aspects of his artistic practice sprout simultaneously and thus generate an indivisible body; architecture, drawing, photography, installation, audio, video, performances, among other “parts” are combined in a sole statement or aesthetic position. This amalgam of media and disciplines allows Úrculo to open to the possibility of camouflaging and seducing through subtle conjuring tricks of invisible-reality. This is what defines, essentially, his contemporary work.
How many corridors did Robert Walser go through to get to how many rooms? Who greeted the spectators from the right rear seat of that flamboyant Hongqui Red Flag of 1958 while passing by a roundabout adorned with Washington palm trees and Carebara bengalensis ants?
Do not feel overwhelmed if you do not know the answers…there are clues in front of you: Mesoamerican ballgames, cigarette brands, piano displacements, a deflating polka dot balloon, a meticulous list of works of art whose author has been beheaded, diverse plastics in movement, tools, key erasures. Walser and Úrculo (both assistants of renowned inventors and deeply disturbed schizophrenics) shares, besides, a weird taste for visualizing information and, just like that…turn it into something else, another sort of substance.
Before throwing your sphere into the void, quietly say: “Reading is and act”. Georges Perec.
