Curated by Paola Vidari Coen.

RAREFACCIONES

Fran Bobadilla's work is a practice. As I write he sits in front of a six-foot canvas that is darkening with graphite powder.

It is the beginning of the last work, the most important that we will see in the exhibition. All the other works are finished, framed along the walls and on the studio floor. A rug that Fran Bobadilla has made available to me because, for the text, I start from the vision of the images. His idea, his vision is in front my eyes. His search is now over, has taken shape, and is now coming to fruition. Since I have known him, his interest has always been related to observing the bizarre play between volumes and lights, in a playground created by the encounter between architecture and nature. His search always has its origin in a reflection, in a re-reading of the objective, the natural data that crosses the pictorial practice, abandoning the real dimension of the object, to arrive at an intimate, personal and transfigured elaboration of nature and their human intervention. Images that represent a synthesis of past visions through the filter of the artist's subjective sensitivity, with sometimes lyrical, sometimes dreamlike and other times analytical or symbolic results: intimate projections of a subjectivity that, caused by the phenomenon, are assumed and for clear understanding them, they transform and transpose it.

In this new series of works, the solid, concrete, earthy and human beginning, so far recognized in his paintings and drawings, has given way to a new fascination, a new interest that has inevitably transformed the codes and stylistic syntax of Fran Bobadilla, by diversifying and renewing the results of his pictorial elaboration.

Focale Terrena, 2021Oil, charcoal and spray paint, over paper, measuring 19 x 27 cm — **Focale Terrena, 2021**
Oil, charcoal and spray paint, over paper, measuring 19 x 27 cm

The observation point has changed, it is no longer directed at what it finds frontally, at human height, but at what is above. Above the walls, above the rooftops, above the horizon line. What has not changed is the analytical will: which can be born from an aesthetic chance of light, chromaticism, forms. Or be born and inspire a reflection inherent to the phenomenology of the sky: the almost classificatory study of its phenomena that manifest as experience in time and space. However, the research tools still change, since if below the horizon the line is useful as an instrument for measuring space and volume, for what is above it needs to resort to other references. Therefore, the minimum figure, phrase, atom of this speculation is the cloud.

The cloud shows itself to infinite imaginary variations that leave space in primis for interpretation, which can assume multiple representative typologies and, successively, for construction, from which it is possible to define a concept. In the paintings of the series “Paisajes altos" the clouds are constitutive elements of aerial landscapes, in which the sometimes present architectural appeals, help the viewer to make the stark remoteness of what is seen commensurable. Pure tributes to beauty, these works exhort the viewer to pay attention to the extraordinary charm of what is upon us, and invite them to serenity, lightness and nature.

Without ever loosening the union with painting and with pictorial matter, in the “Focale” works, the results of a conceptual reflection emerge as a need to find significant forms that can squeeze the amplitude of projection that the sky and symbolic meanings guard. Those have always been attributed to it: flight, filter, idea, nebula... observing these archetypal clouds puts us in a state of suspension of reality, of strangeness with respect to what happens.

However, works that are born from the will to analytically point out the shape of the clouds in their continuous mutability, are transformed into an invitation to the game dedicated to whoever looks. Works that are based on pareidolia, the objective phenomenon that leads us to see, in the clouds, beyond the visible form. Light works, in which the use of rubbing for the backgrounds, form an ideal sky on which the marked lines that delineate the fluctuating and immaterial forms of the clouds are evident.

The cloud is everything that symbolizes other places, and infinity. It is a symbol of metamorphosis in its own substance. The cloud has an unlimited space and time, in continuous transformation, and it inevitably flows, like our existence. Everything moves, everything shakes and changes at frenzied rhythms; Neither the classical philosophers nor modern physics has escaped that the Essence is the transformation itself: "omnia mutantur", everything changes…

Paola Vidari Coen