Author: Curro González
Technique mixed on canvas.
200 x 500 cm.
What looks to be recognisable and familiar to the spectator on the surface of the canvas is nothing more than a trap for the eyes and a torment for the mind. Familiar with optical illusions, like the earlier painters, and an expert in ophthalmological disorders, Curro González diagnoses short-sightedness, myopia and ocular tension, as well as sideways glances and winks of all kinds. As spectators view his paintings, their vision is gradually adjusted to the point where they are able to see reality.
Skilled in stratagems and transmutations, Curro González uses abundant imagery on his canvases to examine and take notice of the aspects which, hidden from reality, underlie the visible world and its conventions.
In this work, sleep is used to awaken the most threatening reality and to release the monsters that had previously lain dormant. In the clearest spaces of the painting, but no less disturbing even so, he depicts a variety of sequences in which reason must settle the score, putting fantasy to the test. From the bed, the artist walks among the visions lost in the dense territory of his dreams. It is a phantasmagorical painting in which the artist fools the viewer with troubling images, sparkling in the immense mirage of a reality in which the most elemental laws of visual gravity are challenged.
González creates an iconic labyrinth in which the most lucid imagination and the most sinister reality exist side by side. Prisoner of the horror vacui that have always filled his work, he gives free rein on this canvas to all kinds of visions, recycling any and all visions that fall into his hands. With this iconoclastic ecological strategy, Curro González paralyses the disfigured flashes of reality, cleaning up its most sophisticated representations whilst at once contaminating the most ingenuous ones.
As a master of "trompe I'oeil", González, in a show of good humour, baits the spectator, allowing him to discover where the steps lead and where the tracks can be found. A thousand figurations leave us groping around to unveil the meaning of our dreams and our reality. Hidden within them are pleasant readings and terrible narrations, some unconsciously forgotten or buried away. And just when it seems like it’s all a nightmare or a sweet hallucination, the baroque ostentation of an age is astutely enlightened, transfiguring its lights and shadows.