"Nice to have met you." Aitor Lajarin

 

Aitor Lajarin.  My little empire/ delighted to have met us.
(from November 24 to January 7)

For my first exhibition at the Blanca Soto Gallery in Madrid, which corresponds  with my first exhibition in the framework of a gallery in the city, (although a work of mine had previously been seen at the Generación 2005 Cajamadrid exhibition at Casa Encendida), I have decided to make a representative montage of what has been my work to date. I have not tried to collect works since most of the pieces have been made for this exhibition, but I have wanted to show painting and installation in the same space so that the viewer has a more complete vision of what has been happening in recent years. been my job.

Painting and installation in  my case  do not act  as two separate agents, as two clearly differentiated fields that complement each other but rather the installations come to be the prolongation and drift of the painting through the architecture of the exhibition hall, in a kind of expansive action of the painting that enters into interaction and questioning relationship with the architectural framework.

In the case of the Blanca Soto Gallery, I have made a series of paintings and drawings in various formats (from 19x24cm to 250x250cm), in which I describe sequences that occur in delimited spaces, and I have reserved the largest wall of the room to carry out about her an intervention. This intervention, which oozes a very pictorial character although in it I have used various materials and media; paint, adhesive tape, paper, cardboard, photography,  could well be a sum of paintings that expands through space or a collage of sequences that provides a broader view of a larger setting or of a space situation. In this situation in which the exhibition space is activated and becomes so important and where each scene is inserted in a larger narrative, the assembly of the rest of the pieces is equally careful, trying to generate correlations between them and to form in the room a discursive thread that is more or less concrete and evident but that exists, albeit in a latent way. The cohesion  of the pieces and the space is reinforced by the direct pictorial intervention on the walls of the room, which gives the exhibition the appearance and sense of a single installation.

In this exhibition and more and more, the narrative aspect is becoming more important in my work. Ultimately, it is not just a formal experimentation related to the questioning of media and space. It is important the fact of being able through the means that are managed to make pieces that in an open and suggestive way, never imposing, provoke reflections in the spectator who will be the one who ultimately makes the work, internalizing it and confusing it with his own experience. Although the pieces shown here respond to the need to externalize a world of their own where one sets their own rules and values in their own way, hence the title "my little empire", they also seek to connect in a veiled way with the viewer on the ground reflection on the individual and the closest society. The subtitle "delighted to have met each other" claims us, as a group and as individuals, and places us as protagonists of the exhibition.

Aitor Lajarin.

Text of the exhibition by Aitor Lajarin for the Blanca Soto gallery in Madrid.