José María Yturralde

He studied at the School of Fine Arts of San Carlos where he would teach from the late seventies onwards. Yturralde has a trajectory in which the art-science binomial has indelibly marked all of his artistic production, which is inscribed, in a first stage, in optical, kinetic and structural experiences. In the cultural context of the moment, when the abstraction of the Cuenca School was at its highest point, it was even more meritorious to swim against the current in this way, turning his gaze towards constructivist, formalist, rationalist, normative and scientistic tendencies only permissible in the fields of architecture and design (dominated by the International Style). This path will lead to his well-known Impossible Figures. Also series such as Structures, Maclas, Perspectives and Computerized Forms, as well as his optical-luminous works with laser and holographic technique, confirm his determined will to—fascinated by new scientific and technical challenges—explore their expressive possibilities within artistic parameters. In 1975, after obtaining a research grant, he moved to the mythical Center for Advanced Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). Between 1975 and 1986, Yturralde abandons traditional pictorial practice and ventures into other artistic manifestations linked to action art and, above all, to that derivation of art-nature that is Sky-Art. Precisely with this type of flying structures, he participates in 1978 in the Venice Biennial.

His return to painting takes shape in a series of works of strong geometric character in which chromatic planes appear perfectly defined (hard-edge) and ordered in successions of striking chromatic ranges and sharp contrasts of complementary colors. It is from 1996 onwards when he begins to blur those hard contours to introduce the viewer into pictorial surfaces of rare magnetism that evoke the blurry indefinition of fog, mist, of the infinite.

Text provided by the Mediterranean Foundation. Author: J. B. Peiró.