Page 128 - YGARTUA: Magnum Opus - volume two

The painter tells us about those dialectics of the
game which, breaking free from the confines of
the chessboard, extend to the whole world: the
pawns moved by the players are simply men, translates this state of archaic upset on his
whose lives are piloted by a higher will. The
black and white of the checks push us towards
the unknown, in that lucid gestural
and chromatic confusion, where reality
and game merge into an unspecified
dilation of space and time: the real
world dissolves into one inorganic
mass, to flow into new existences.
Also in the exultation of the female form, as in
“Femmes du Carnaval” and “Spanish Nuns”,
Ygartua praises life and its origin. Primitive faces,
with synthetic, intense features, reminiscent
of African masks or Egyptian faces join with
voluptuous and flourishing bodies typical of
divine figures paying tribute to fertility and
procreation. The womanly figures, portrayed
with a few sinuous but basic black lines, emerge
from the aesthetic disorder beneath, as if life,
despite everything, can be resurrected infinitely.
The artist, having abandoned conventional
organization and having chose to communicate
in informal terms, also expresses the desire to
return to the raw materials, to the primordial
state of things. But the emotional chaos to
which it refers can also represent the cosmic,
psychological and artistic dimension, which
precedes every creative deed. The painter
canvases because he is aware that this condition
acts as an original matrix: its strength generates
creation. In this chaos, all the elements are
joined before submitting to a single moderating
force.
Every artist, like a skilled alchemist, has the
opportunity to retrace this shapeless mass to
perfection but can, like Ygartua, first study
the evolutionary processes, describing their
potential and the vigor released before anything
new is manifested. The artist’s creations take
us on an initiatory trip, they correspond to the
metaphor of an inner journey which leads to a
greater awareness of what moves the deepest
area of consciences: primordial chaos must be
crossed like a sort of regenerating bath.
Breakdown followed by rebirth, a storm
followed by calm, the certainties of the finite
followed by the ecstasies of the infinite. Excerpt.
Primordial Chaos
by Flora Rovigo, Art Historian
124