03/03/05 to 04/30/05
The Diocesan Museum of San Sebastián presents the original artworks of the book-album ‘En voz baja’, written by Miguel Chavarría and illustrated by Alfredo Bikondoa. The expo is completed with the artist’s recent large-format artwork.

Alfredo Bikondoa, the form of the spirit, by Juan Pablo Huércanos

The contemplation of art carries with it the demand of a new position, of a renewed personal position before the reality shown. Art, understood in its most essential, less artificial and social conception, imposes with forcefulness a way of being looked at and contemplated. It forces and causes a temporary paralysis of thought, impeded by its manifest inability to resort to memory or reason to locate that view before the new realities exposed.

In the transit of this involuntary reflex the creative work of Alfredo Bikondoa moves, in a continuous process of search of the factors capable of provoking that internal commotion, necessary before any process of revelation. Painting is a way of developing consciousness that has to be related to the ultimate reality, says Bikondoa and the formal resolution of this vital paradigm is his creative work: his paintings, objects and sculptures. Indifferent to format, material; Only pending the rigorous internal harmony that governs its aesthetic designs.

Precisely, from the impossibility of facing the unknown through the known, the failure found and confessed to appeal to reason to culminate the creative fact arises the energy that moves the strokes of the work of Bikondoa. That articulates his particular way of relating to the world, showing his small containers of thought and emotion.

On this occasion, everything is part of the same purpose and the work comprises a set without obvious articulation, but that refers to the idea of ​​constant testing. A continuous evolution in the construction of irrational spaces in search of harmonies and communicating balances, in the journey towards the materialization of truths hidden under the layers of painting.

The formation of Bikondoa’s work thus investigates the key factors that foster this contemplation. Essential shapes that touch the geometric, powerful textures with space for deepening, vibrant colors that radiate a light and constant energy and a silent painting environment located outside the temporality, located in the middle of some forms that deserve to be pierced, in a Aesthetic resolution that even adopts the recurrent configuration of doors that demand to be crossed.

This search for expressive lightness, the use of silent pictorial elements, the pursuit of the essential as an expressive paradigm, and the removal of any narrative, descriptive or taken from reality, constantly places Bikondoa’s painting on the brink of nothing. It is only held in the form of forms capable of hiding invisible breaths. Lurking, expectant. Archetypal forms, devoid of artifice. Dead Stillness of the Spirit.