Alain Urrutia, REGARD SUR LE REGARD (High Spirits) #2 Berlin, 2023-2025. Imagen curtesy of Alain Urrutia
REGARD SUR LE REGARD
CAB de Burgos
From Ocober 3, 2025 to January 18, 2026
The project addressed by Alain Urrutia (Bilbao, 1981) for the CAB delves into one of the central questions for contemporary art: does art exist without a spectator? Can it be described as such if it is not even possible to contemplate it? Urrutia starts his work from an assertion. It is photography that turns an image into reality; painting transforms the image (the representation, therefore) into another reality in which the very act of painting, its making, its factory, but also its own syntax, is present. In this way there is only a distant and evaluative contemplation in which the viewer subjects the images he witnesses to interpretative judgment, and whose origin he assumes to know at the same time that his own certainty is questioned.
The primacy that Alain Urrutia gives to the responsibility of the viewer and his gaze has been based, in the previous exhibitions, on a very concrete formalization: the use of the fragment, sometimes extracted and limited to certain sizes and limits of portable appearance.However, the exhibition that Urrutia presents at the CAB is a complete paradigm shift. It is not exclusively about its appearance with disproportionate sizes (only seen so far for a few days in an industrial warehouse in Berlin, so they are strictly unpublished), but because its scale also entails a new investment in the role of the viewer and his gaze.
The six diptychs that articulate Regard sur le regard contain observant faces before which there is no room for more than submission. Subordinating whoever contemplates them by the haughty fixity of the representations extracted from archaeological, sculptural and pictorial icons, the viewer also becomes part of the work by confronting his dynamic gaze with that of the inert image. Even more, both, spectator and representation, become a new whole in the eyes of a third witness.
"I propose a crossing of gazes in which the spectator is part of the show,"concludes Alain Urrutia.
Más info en la página web de CAB de Burgos.
