The work of Nicolás Combarro is grounded in insistent attempt, in continuous exercise, in repeated and documented action. In the transversal selection drawn from several of his series for this episode of Interludios, this insistence concentrates on a single form in order to unfold multiple approaches to a constant.

Within the catalogue of images that the artist produces and draws from, this exhibitionary conversation is founded on a square, a rectangle, two triangles set in opposition so as to once again form a four-sided composition… Fields of color, measuring lines, geometries—forms that develop against a continuous ground.

The assault on form—its pursuit, composition, and decomposition—makes it possible to traverse those grounds. Grounds that are specific landscapes the artist actively seeks out. He searches for them, or they emerge to meet him, as happens to a trained and attentive eye. While the forms evoke art-historical references that oscillate between three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality—from El Lissitzky and Schwitters to Kounellis or Miguel Ángel Campano—the grounds are tied to a particular stance toward what has been abandoned, set aside, concealed, or forgotten: a political vision of recovery, recognition, revaluation, and restoration. Form as a squared position.

The ground surges forward and resonates as the primary plane, as the artistic action documented in the images. Works from the series Línea, Línea de sombra, Arquitectura espontánea, Desvelar/desplazar, Sotterranei, and La materia del silencio generate—through the actions undertaken and through pictorial, sculptural, or luminous movement—staged interventions: whether in industrial buildings, abandoned structures, creations at the limits of the imaginable, concealed foundations, or architectures of repression erased from collective memory.

In his analysis of aesthetic observation—a text that asks why we look at something beyond its beauty—Paul Ziff refers to the piece Samuel Beckett made for television in 1981, Quad: “Modern works of art often require prolonged and continuous attention in order to be appreciated. The same is true of an alligator basking in the sun on the muddy bank of a swamp. Everything that is observed demands something in return”[i]. Beckett’s exercise was likewise structured around a square, with four characters traversing it in a sequence of cadences. A “ballet for four people,” in which each follows a specific movement and rhythm, always avoiding contact with one another and with the central area, which he terms the “danger zone.”

Now, from within this “danger zone,” carefully observing the trajectories Combarro traces in each work makes it possible to reveal that ground.

Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo

[1] Ziff, P. (1984). Anything Viewed. In: Antiaesthetics. An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose. Synthese Library, vol 174. Springer, Dordrecht.