Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Postludio [Postlude]

Image caption
JOSÉ MARÍA YTURRALDE

Postludio [Postlude]

  • 2000
  • Acrylic on canvas
  • 190 x 190 cm
  • Cat. P_723
  • Acquired in 2006
By:
Beatriz Herráez

Started in the 1990s, the Preludes / Interludes / Postludes series comprises one of the most significant bodies of work by José María Yturralde. The pieces form a sort of trilogy, whose titles already allude to the exchanges used by the artist in his work, in this case clearly referring to his interest in sound art and music: ‘Most of my exhibitions are also in response to repeated, specific listening to a symphony’.

The notions of the absolute and beauty, the use of monochrome, pure colour, geometry, rhythm, harmony and the ‘quoting’ of creators including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and James Turrell — just a few names from a much longer list that show the scholarship of the artist — are overlaid in sublime images that give out an ‘inner illumination’. Their disconcerting luminosity seems, on the other hand, to be the result of some kind of hidden industrial device.

In a game of perception on the limits of vision, built up by delving into the physicality and ‘interaction’ of colour inherited from Josef Albers, Postlude is structured into an amalgam combining and modulating temperatures, overlays, transparencies, contrasts and, finally, ‘illusion’. Similarly, the serial nature and construction of the pictorial space, the foundations of these pieces, capture the sensitivity, energy and complexity of Yturralde’s visual language and of his analytical rigour.

Art critic and historian Daniel Giralt-Miracle accurately describes his art in his assertion that ‘the subtle and oft-debated borderline between the visible world and the hidden world is reflected in painting which, without renouncing all the paraphernalia of theory and practice that he has acquired during his career, is located in what we might call onto-painting, which in the world of art and in the world of thought is still a radical option, assumed with courage and some risk’.

Yturralde brought to an end one of his most extensive investigations with an exhibition of his Postludes-Void, organised by the Gering & López Gallery in New York (1998-2007).

Beatriz Herráez

 
By:
Beatriz Herráez
José María Yturralde
Cuenca 1942

A graduate and with a PhD in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos de Valencia, José María Yturralde is a full professor of Painting at the Fine Arts Faculty in that city.  Highlights of his exceptional biography include his joining the Cuenca Abstract Art Museum team in 1966 and the Antes del arte group in 1967; and his attending the seminars of the Computing Centre at the University of Madrid in 1968. Yturralde’s accolades include a Juan March Grant in 1974 which allowed him to continue studying at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. In 2020, he received the National Award for Plastic Arts.

Yturralde’s first works – his series entitled Geometric Abstraction (1965-1967) – were linked to studying form, perspective and colour and the use of a ‘language of extremely limited vocabulary and rigorous syntax’, to quote the critic and painter Juan Antonio Aguirre. As a result of his time at the Computing Centre, his exploration evolved towards pieces such as Computable Forms (1968-1971) and Impossible Figures (1968-1973), images constructed based on games of perception and false perspectives. From his floating installations and structures in the 1980s, his output has steadily expanded and been enriched with the incorporation of new technologies and the influence of other disciplines such as mathematics and music, to the point where he is considered one of Spain’s most remarkable investigators of plastic art. His series include Preludes (1991-1996) / Interludes (1996-1998) / Postludes (1998-2007) and Enso (2015-2016).

Yturralde is a full member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia. He has exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial (1967); the Venice Biennale (1978); and the Mercosur Biennial (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1999). Solo shows of his work have been staged at the Spanish Contemporary Art Museum in Madrid (1973); the Joan Miró Foundation (Barcelona, 1981); the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 1999); the Caja de Burgos Art Centre (2005); and the Malaga Contemporary Art Centre (2015).

Beatriz Herráez

 
«Postludes» (New York, 2007-2008).
Carolina F. Castrillo Lápiz, José María Yturralde, 2008, n.º 239, vol.1. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.