The Atlas polyptych is a paradoxical work because it seems to make and not make sense. At first glance it does not seem to have it: it is a series of geometric shapes, planes, lines and colours. But, immediately, it encourages us to find an explanation of what we see, to ask ourselves if that checkerboard of abstract images contains a meaning or, at least, has some logic. In other words, the work is paradoxical because, under that abstract appearance, it invites us to seek a hidden interpretation, to decode those forms as if they were signs and symbols. And the title itself supports that demand for meaning that takes us out of our initial perplexity. Because what is an atlas but a representation of the world? With their maps, plates or pictures, there are geographical, celestial, historical, anatomical, linguistic... Even artists have been inspired by them to create a new type of work that is not limited to the single picture, to the autonomous and isolated piece, but which extends to the multiplicity of the series, to the collection of images presented as an archive of documents. Suffice to mention the well-known atlases of Gerhard Richter and Marcel Broodthaers or the albums of Hannah Hoch and Louis Bourgeois. And while there is a substantial difference between these types of work, consisting of the appropriation of images of things or real beings through photography, and this set of paintings expressly made by Nelo Vinuesa, several of them (that is the paradox) evoke signs or symbols, suggesting the appropriation of some kind of convention or code.

And it is no less paradoxical -contrary to the foreseeable- that Atlas is a geometric painting when its author is not a geometric painter. What’s more, critics often present Nelo Vinuesa as a painter whose central theme is the landscape. A genre that he reinterprets from the visual culture of videogames, animation films or computer graphics, combined with traces of the pictorial tradition, from the simplicity of medieval miniatures to the colourful outdoor scenes of Bosch or Brueghel. Employing a peculiar technique of painting-collage which consists of composing images with superimposed layers of painterly and extra-painterly procedures, by means of a process without previous sketch that is completed subjectively and, to a certain extent, randomly, in which the impersonal finishes are juxtaposed with the expressive gestures. Resulting in hypermodern landscapes of surreal views which are not exempt from romantic idealism. But we appreciate none of this in Atlas: it is not a figurative painting, its technique is of the most orthodox, and it seems painted with the premeditation, calculation and objectivity characteristic of geometric abstraction.

These apparent contradictions are resolved when contemplating Atlas in light of the complete works of its author. Nelo Vinuesa surprised in his first two solo shows in 2007 with paintings that profoundly renewed painting, made by superimposing adhesive coloured plastic papers, initially cut manually and then using a cutting plotter. They were hybrid paintings that vaguely reminded (for their peculiar technique and formal subtlety) that “drawing with scissors” of the late Matisse, although they are not figurative and are more complex in composition; but in which a connection with the digital image was already indicated, in some cases because they were conceived as frames of a video- game (“Scroll”, 2007), in others because they introduced pixelated shapes and, even, signs, logos or perfectly recognizable pictograms (“ El cielo recortado”, The cut out sky, 2007). This approach to the digital and its iconography was consolidated in the following two individual shows. In the one called “Island” (2008), over the painting of expressionist figures were superimposed a layer of adhesive vinyl with small geometric motifs (signs, flags, plots, graphics...) and another of acetate paper, covered by a sheet of perspex, resulting in a crowded, heterogeneous and multicoloured effect that Ricardo Forriols -a connoisseur of his career- called a “tuning painting style”. In the other exhibition, “Mirage” (2011), that iconographic eclecticism configured unusual virtual landscapes, primitive and sophisticated at the same time, as in a technological tale or, even better, a classic video-game; and which Antonio Garcia Berrio ascribes to a current of recent Spanish painting baptized by him as Neo-baroque. In the later works, shown in Castlehead” (2014), Nelo Vinuesa refines these scenes making them more diaphanous and colourful, eliminating the vinyl and the figures, whilst introducing markedly symbolic motifs (obelisks, pyramids, minarets, crosses, stars, mountains...), thus achieving a landscape which is at the same time, natural and urban, real and fictitious, as seen through the Borgian Aleph.

At the same time, Vinuesa’s inclination to expand painting in space and time has led him to experiment with sculpture and video; “What interests me is to create a pictorial discourse that is not limited by the space format or the support; that has the freedom to expand in different spaces, supports, disciplines...". Already in 2007, in collaboration with Samuel Ortí (with whom formed the Bimotor team) he built La moule volonte, a sculpture that we could well describe, to paraphrase Lautreamont as, beautiful as the fortuitous encounter on the dissection table of a washing machine motor and two car hoods; which was followed by the kinetic and interactive installation Mechanic Park (2009), half industrial city half pinball board; and the artefacts created by assembling different mechanisms for the exhibition “Motor” (2011). Subsequently, this exploration of the city is taken up, this time alone, in the Treasure Island (2014) installation. On the other hand, his foray into video, begun with Recurrent Dream (2010), is a reincarnation of his painting, but with a more expressionistic and lugubrious aesthetic, as can be seen in the six pieces made in London that make up Wild Pulse (2012).

Atlas was painted in Madrid during the residence of its author in the Casa Velazquez, where it was exhibited for the first time, although with a different composition, proof of the open, extensive and un-hierarchical character of the work. Because, as we are finally able to see, the simple geometries of this atlas are a repertoire of basic resources, a kind of Vinuesian visual alphabet, which not only refers to the previous work, but also prefigures the one exhibited the following year in Axis Mundi, in the manner of its particular Atlas Mnemosyne.

—José Martínez Martínez

Text published in the catalog "Primers moments / Art contemporani de la Comunitat Valenciana. 2018

Atlas_2015

The Atlas polyptych is a paradoxical work because it seems to make and not make sense. At first glance it does not seem to have it: it is a series of geometric shapes, planes, lines and colours. But, immediately, it encourages us to find an explanation of what we see, to ask ourselves if that checkerboard of abstract images contains a meaning or, at least, has some logic. In other words, the work is paradoxical because, under that abstract appearance, it invites us to seek a hidden interpretation, to decode those forms as if they were signs and symbols. And the title itself supports that demand for meaning that takes us out of our initial perplexity. Because what is an atlas but a representation of the world? With their maps, plates or pictures, there are geographical, celestial, historical, anatomical, linguistic... Even artists have been inspired by them to create a new type of work that is not limited to the single picture, to the autonomous and isolated piece, but which extends to the multiplicity of the series, to the collection of images presented as an archive of documents. Suffice to mention the well-known atlases of Gerhard Richter and Marcel Broodthaers or the albums of Hannah Hoch and Louis Bourgeois. And while there is a substantial difference between these types of work, consisting of the appropriation of images of things or real beings through photography, and this set of paintings expressly made by Nelo Vinuesa, several of them (that is the paradox) evoke signs or symbols, suggesting the appropriation of some kind of convention or code.

And it is no less paradoxical -contrary to the foreseeable- that Atlas is a geometric painting when its author is not a geometric painter. What’s more, critics often present Nelo Vinuesa as a painter whose central theme is the landscape. A genre that he reinterprets from the visual culture of videogames, animation films or computer graphics, combined with traces of the pictorial tradition, from the simplicity of medieval miniatures to the colourful outdoor scenes of Bosch or Brueghel. Employing a peculiar technique of painting-collage which consists of composing images with superimposed layers of painterly and extra-painterly procedures, by means of a process without previous sketch that is completed subjectively and, to a certain extent, randomly, in which the impersonal finishes are juxtaposed with the expressive gestures. Resulting in hypermodern landscapes of surreal views which are not exempt from romantic idealism. But we appreciate none of this in Atlas: it is not a figurative painting, its technique is of the most orthodox, and it seems painted with the premeditation, calculation and objectivity characteristic of geometric abstraction.

These apparent contradictions are resolved when contemplating Atlas in light of the complete works of its author. Nelo Vinuesa surprised in his first two solo shows in 2007 with paintings that profoundly renewed painting, made by superimposing adhesive coloured plastic papers, initially cut manually and then using a cutting plotter. They were hybrid paintings that vaguely reminded (for their peculiar technique and formal subtlety) that “drawing with scissors” of the late Matisse, although they are not figurative and are more complex in composition; but in which a connection with the digital image was already indicated, in some cases because they were conceived as frames of a video- game (“Scroll”, 2007), in others because they introduced pixelated shapes and, even, signs, logos or perfectly recognizable pictograms (“ El cielo recortado”, The cut out sky, 2007). This approach to the digital and its iconography was consolidated in the following two individual shows. In the one called “Island” (2008), over the painting of expressionist figures were superimposed a layer of adhesive vinyl with small geometric motifs (signs, flags, plots, graphics...) and another of acetate paper, covered by a sheet of perspex, resulting in a crowded, heterogeneous and multicoloured effect that Ricardo Forriols -a connoisseur of his career- called a “tuning painting style”. In the other exhibition, “Mirage” (2011), that iconographic eclecticism configured unusual virtual landscapes, primitive and sophisticated at the same time, as in a technological tale or, even better, a classic video-game; and which Antonio Garcia Berrio ascribes to a current of recent Spanish painting baptized by him as Neo-baroque. In the later works, shown in Castlehead” (2014), Nelo Vinuesa refines these scenes making them more diaphanous and colourful, eliminating the vinyl and the figures, whilst introducing markedly symbolic motifs (obelisks, pyramids, minarets, crosses, stars, mountains...), thus achieving a landscape which is at the same time, natural and urban, real and fictitious, as seen through the Borgian Aleph.

At the same time, Vinuesa’s inclination to expand painting in space and time has led him to experiment with sculpture and video; “What interests me is to create a pictorial discourse that is not limited by the space format or the support; that has the freedom to expand in different spaces, supports, disciplines...". Already in 2007, in collaboration with Samuel Ortí (with whom formed the Bimotor team) he built La moule volonte, a sculpture that we could well describe, to paraphrase Lautreamont as, beautiful as the fortuitous encounter on the dissection table of a washing machine motor and two car hoods; which was followed by the kinetic and interactive installation Mechanic Park (2009), half industrial city half pinball board; and the artefacts created by assembling different mechanisms for the exhibition “Motor” (2011). Subsequently, this exploration of the city is taken up, this time alone, in the Treasure Island (2014) installation. On the other hand, his foray into video, begun with Recurrent Dream (2010), is a reincarnation of his painting, but with a more expressionistic and lugubrious aesthetic, as can be seen in the six pieces made in London that make up Wild Pulse (2012).

Atlas was painted in Madrid during the residence of its author in the Casa Velazquez, where it was exhibited for the first time, although with a different composition, proof of the open, extensive and un-hierarchical character of the work. Because, as we are finally able to see, the simple geometries of this atlas are a repertoire of basic resources, a kind of Vinuesian visual alphabet, which not only refers to the previous work, but also prefigures the one exhibited the following year in Axis Mundi, in the manner of its particular Atlas Mnemosyne.

Text published in the catalog "Primers moments / Art contemporani de la Comunitat Valenciana. 2018