No Apparent Content
By Alay Fuentes Bejerano
Since ancient times, man has manifested in different ways his attachment to the world he inhabits; in fact, the human being acquires all his formation from it. Art has been one of the fundamental motives for mankind to confer to his environment an irreverent and connoted idealism. Many are the proofs of this relationship predestined by sages and prophets, the distance to be covered is still enormous, but every time an artist captures his subconscious in a pictorial work, the distance between the two becomes smaller.
Such is the case of the artist Yuri O’Hallorans. I was trapped between lines and performative colors, between the real world and the mythical one, between an endless game for life and the great desires of a creator to turn his work into an escape route to this tangled riddle called art.
Interacting with his work, his canvases revealed a habitat little experienced by me. The intimate way in which he tells his story, immerses us in a peculiarly colorful conceptual framework, as if he were trying to change the formal patterns of his universe, as if life stopped right in his creations, as if the pictorial cosmos he depicts were hovering over the common viewer.
His recurrent inquiry into the natural and human conflicts, wander with the mystical and the unreal, to try to elucidate a passage to a new reality, motivated entirely by the preconceived way of providing his art with conceptual tools for the psychoanalysis of it.
The divine creation, the mythological, fertility, the symbolic come together in a brilliant way in the discourse of this artist, trying to guide us through a pictorial space full of contradictions, of elements referring to diverse cultural expressions, through a creative chaos full of wonderful artistic solutions.
O’Hallorans’ creations are a fusion of feelings and empathies. Pride, passion and intelligence stand as homologous parts of an apparent proximity, although according to the artist there is another truth, the real one, which unfortunately we lose sight of even with its constant signs.
I understand Yuri’s work as a journey through his psyche, through the silence of the public, to culminate in complex human emotions that make up our immediate environment. The intensity of his color ranges is part of our space-time, and accompanies the artist in the desperate desire to reach the power of immediacy. His work is like a pendulum (it seems to constantly return to a previous starting point), which manages to make his creations conquer conceptual horizontality and verticality of an art that combines time and space in the presence of today’s Homo Sapiens, who ceases to be a mere spectator, to become a fundamental part of his creative universe.
The artist’s pictorial work is linked to a process that is very concerned with the existing diegesis between the analysis of forms and their poetic symbolism. He focuses on creating interesting figures as well as their objectual correspondences, in order to gradually develop a differential discourse on surrounding events and actions. In some cases making parallels with nature as an inspirational platform, in addition to a high range of irony.
Significant forms and their subsequent exposure is an element that concerns the creation of this artist, turning fragile objects into essences of a saying, which leads him to experiment relationships between powers, schemes, society, history, nature and objective thought.
Social, political and religious conflicts are part of a language that makes us think and find in the creator’s works a certain visual value, which feeds our imaginary, our artistic being.
His creative self bases all his responsibility on the symbolic form of the game. The staging of its varieties of colors absorbs all the importance of the two-dimensional dialogue, taking the reins and the decisive role in the approach of the idea. The positions of the object in space, the shadows and its morphology are indispensable resources in the process, to which we add an excellent aesthetic taste and a sweetened mixed technique on canvas.
