Would you like to discover what an artist is capable of only with 8B pencils?
Artizar gallery gives you the opportunity to enter wooded landscapes executed with graphite of such visual power that at the first contact with them you will be magnetized. Who makes these drawings his form of expression, working almost exclusively with pencil and graphite on various surfaces? The Spanish creator Julio Blancas is responsible for capturing large lithic landscapes, full of optical effects and a great mineral luminosity, defined line by line with such visceral delivery that the viewer will not be indifferent. Julio draws from nature as a source of inspiration, simulating natural spaces; being really mental landscapes, ordered with intention and meaning.
Exhibition Nada que ría
It is made up of around thirty pieces, ranging from huge graphite forests to other objects of a more sculptural nature. The selection includes recently made works and recovers older ones, joining them in a discourse that has become the best way to get closer to the always passionate way in which this exalted artist works.
The formats are combined in this new exhibition project and range from the three great forests in which to meet the artist (Stoneyway, Caída and Symmetric, made in the second half of last year) to a polyptych from 2006 that evokes a suggestive and mysterious rocky landscape
Tafoni
We can also contemplate the most recent series, made up of small drawings on synthetic paper; graphite spots suspended in reinterpretation of these volcanic shapes captured in drawings and framed inside boxes. «They were made in 2020, during the first months of the pandemic, when Julio suffered a fall while painting one of his canvases of more than 2 meters that prevented him from continuing in his study; for this reason these tafoni were working at home, ”described Frasco Pinto, manager of this room.
Optical Illusions
Among the curiosities of this new exhibition is Piedra (2020), an expertly interpreted object that looks like a granite rock. The artist spent no less than six months to transform a wooden framework into a piece of granite, recreating the granulated surface of the mineral with tiny and precise drops of white paint on small spots of black paint and vice versa, covering it completely and giving rise to, as Ramiro Carrillo said in his day, to a new “container of time, charged with a powerfully eloquent intensity”
Unknown Collage
Art fans who visit the gallery will also be able to enjoy a series of previously unpublished photographs. “During his walks and research, he takes series of photographs of interesting basalt formations that he presents here for the first time as collage of impossible formations.”
Methodology
His technique is simple and stubborn: He darkens surfaces by repeating lines. Strokes always made with graphite that accurately reflect the light gradations and give rise to shapes that arise from opacity, from the totality of black, thanks to an exquisite organization of the surface established so that the reflection and brightness of the exterior light ends the work.
We have before us the opportunity to better understand the work and the creative processes of Julio Blancas’ work: “how it comes and goes from figuration to abstraction, but always with a figurative base,” added Pinto.
Do not miss it.
Discover more works by Julio Blancas: https://artizar.es/exposicion/julio-blancas-%C2%B7-nueces-en-el-tejado/