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The root of Guedes's work is located in the MADÍ movement, of Argentine origin and little repercussion in Spain, which attaches great importance to the tensions that are established within the works, also with the places where they are located, to enhance its geometric axes and privilege self-referentiality. Proof of the vitality of this movement, which dates back to the publication of Arturo magazine in 1944, directed by the Uruguayan Carmelo Arden Quin in Buenos Aires, is the exhibition that is now on display at the Manolo Eirín gallery from 1 June of the current.
In this exhibition we see the artistic appointment rise to the levels required by that self-referentiality demanded by MADÍ and for which we could find precedents prior to Guedes in the works of Jack Whigen Lambda I, Lambda II and Lambda III, as well as Kappa I, all of them by 1976 and belonging to the series The Greek Alphabet PainGngs (1975-1978), in clear appointment, to a Mark Rothko who strips of his colors to leave it in strict black and white. Winks that we also find in Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau 2° le gaz d'éclairage... (1946-1966) by Marcel Duchamp, which would be impossible without Salvador Dalí's The Little Theater (1934). Or in the close relationship between the carnality of the School of London and the Portrait of Innocent X (1650) by Velázquez, to which Francis Bacon never stopped returning, and of which we have the case of the almost Coruña-born Tim Behrens, protagonist of the acclaimed Red Haired Man on a Chair (1962) by Lucian Freud or the lesser-known Portrait of Timothy Behrens (1962) by Michael Andrews. Although in A Coruña the example of Picasso and his Meninas is always used, again around Velázquez.Guedes adds a completely new element to this succession of quotes in a context geometric, as is the recourse to tradition that begins with the trompe l'oeil and cloys us in the worst moments of surrealism. Well, he takes his favorite works of geometric abstraction from the 20th and 21st centuries as references, which have nothing to do with astronomical mimesis, and a lot to do with the iconoclastic impulse that we find in Piet Mondrian, to subject them to an optical illusionism that intersects the traditions of optical-kinetic art with the geometric to dry.
That is why this series, which is presented as a premiere in Spain, is so interesting, because it subjects geometry to the most extreme figurative illusionism, showing that there are no territories exempt from irony, as it would seem in the case of geometric abstraction, due to its extremely free independence of the representation.

Exhibited artists

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