Pablo Gaga, Pablo García García García or Pablo Jeje, born in León in 1975, are some of the identifications that this important artist usually uses, as explicit and delimiting references of his different artistic projections in the public sphere. He is a multifaceted creator who has maintained an intense and fruitful activity since obtaining his degree in Design and Audiovisual in 2000, at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Salamanca. It has a broad trajectory in which we can highlight some samples made in the Cubo Azul gallery, the Fúcares gallery, DA2 of Salamanca and several collective calls in ARCO 06 and ARCO 08, in the Centro Leonés de Arte (ILC) or the MUSAC among others. His creations are present in different collections and have been analyzed by prominent figures in contemporary art, including professor and curator Javier Hernando Carrasco, País critic Alberto Martín and ABC cultural analyst Francisco Carpio.

 

The Collage series nourishes and shapes the content of this publication and the exhibition presented at the Centro Leonés de Arte ILC, composed of a set of one hundred pieces. The series takes as a starting point Pablo García's interest in a collective project conceived in 2014 in Madrid between three collage artists and subsequently developed by multiple artists of national and international level, centered on the recovery of traditional and purist technique classic photographic collage, a proposal in which the members of the collective were required to make one collage per day: The Counted Days.

 

Pablo García García is a creator from the field of new technologies applied to plastic creation, design and image, and therefore from the virtual world, and suddenly his interest led him to immerse himself in a totally unknown but deeply interesting, who submitted and transferred it to historical-artistic moments of the 1920s and 1930s (in Spain Josep Renau or Nicolás Lekuona) refocusing partly in the field of photographic collage but with current technological tools. The research space for images and photographic material for the formulation of its research will focus not on the printed territory but on the vast and heterogeneous world of media and the informative iconosphere, an immense database, available on networks and easily and immediately accessible which extends the origin of archives and documents to global dimensions; as well as the processing of images by computer instead of those produced by hand.

 

Pablo García's choice of images is meticulous and subtle, an issue that raises or comes close to the idea of appropriationism (since the images were captured, created or created by other photographers, designers or artists) as part essential to his work, just as it happens in that of many current creators such as Rogelio López Cuenca, the Mundo Feliz collective and Pablo Genovés. Although it has been called this since the 1980s, this term refers specifically to the act of copying or quoting the work of another artist to generate a new creation, more or less modified from the original. Pablo, from the selection of images, uses the articulation of different and even opposing components, fusion, manipulation, processing and simulation, which will be essential keys in a very substantial part of his work as it happens in other series of its genre: Desideratum, Los Hijos que no tuvimos or Bloody Mary, with the exception of a few purely documentary works, resulting from photographic shooting and unmanipulated archives, like Crack, which incorporates a sense intense criticism in relation to the current economic situation in León, or the Memento Mori series, which offers a nostalgic approach and the memory of the past and the ephemeral sense of human and cultural existence.

 

The works show a uniform composition using a very centralized and balanced structure, of exquisite simplicity, cleanliness and austerity. Two, three or four compositional elements at most, chosen, appropriate and articulated or combined with each other, arranged on a neutral, homogeneous and whitish background, identical for the works that make up the project (except four), constituting a reading unit lucid, coherent and perfect, filled with intense and evocative multidirectional suggestions. A powerful, striking, direct and minimal plastic and conceptual formulation, which leaves us perplexed and overwhelmed by the visual force of the image reformulated by means of a sort of surreal and magical meccano, which to a certain extent evokes the great master of photographic surrealism or fantastic realism Jorge Rueda, a fundamental driving force of the changes produced in Spanish photography in the 1980s. Pablo with some images provokes in us astonishment for the unreal and monstrous, but credible and close (Metamorphosis, Swordfish or La Caricia ), and at the same time for the wonderful polysemous charge of its images and titles (Tres en uno, Montar un Pollo o Vino con Gas), which with ironic and refined mastery opposes antagonistic symbolic realities. The lively and intelligent criticism slides with extreme delicacy and finesse between the playful and imaginative play of some of his works, imbuing his work with a biting, sarcastic and satirical sense in relation to society in areas such as politics (6 JANUARY, Moscón de Reyes), history (Sahara), religion (Stop of God or Scene of a Crime), design (Dolce Banana), culture (the Luminous House) or uses (Hooked). On the other hand, his compositions have a lively and deep playful and poetic charge, which somehow links him to the visual poetry of Joan Brossa, resemanticizing the signifier in an individual and constructive way. As an example, we find the piece "Pupilas Gustativas" by Pablo in relation to "Eclipse" by Brossa very close in its aesthetic and non-conceptual formulation. There is also a certain proximity in the strangeness of the objects that Pablo raises in relation to the poetic language of Chema Madoz, although the latter generates his creations with scenographic plans by means of models and therefore in a real way, unlike Pablo who uses virtual language.

 

The image is essential in this creative proposal, but the concept, the idea, which is faithfully transcribed in the text or the title of each piece, is no less a structural element which becomes essential in the conceptual articulation and understanding of the piece. The exhibition incorporates, at the same time, several collage poems by Elena Lafuente Alonso with an interesting aesthetic and visual contribution, linked to the beginnings of European Dadaism. Fresh, direct compositions, full of expressiveness, inspired by or evoking several of Pablo's works, which open up new creative territories and semantic expansion.

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Freely inspired and translated from the original text in Castilian by

Luis García Martínez / Director, Art and Exhibitions Department, ILC

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