09/28/12 to 11/25/12
The Contemporary Art Center of the Antonio Pérez Foundation in Cuenca, a spectacular building, former Convent of the Carmelites, hosts in its main  temporary exhibitions rooms, ‘The graveyard by the sea – Homage to Paul Valéry’ by Bikondoa. At the same time, two other museums of the this Foundation will host different series by the Basque artist.

‘Bikondoa. Through art and silence, he proposes us a spitirual journey’, by Álvaro Bermejo (Diario Vasco journal published article)

The old shaman, Jorge Oteiza, did it through his metaphysical boxes. Rothko also challenged us to peer into his enormous black rectangles as one delves into an initiative experience. The painting of Alfredo Bikondoa has something of both, that now is completed with the submerged boxes of its ‘Marine Cemetery’. We descended for the first time to this abysmal world in the Aquarium of San Sebastián. Today its great totemic walls anchored between damned ships have run aground in the three headquarters of the Foundation Antonio Pérez, in Cuenca. Through art and silence, Bikondoa proposes a spiritual journey guided by what Baudrillard defined as symbolic exchange and death.

The crisis that overwhelms us implies a global shipwreck – a shipwreck of meaning. This is what is noticed in a first confrontation with the alchemical canvases of Bikondoa. Walls of marble dust, black as the dark night, broken by diagonals of extreme violence. And, on them, stains of colors that can not live together. That is the challenge. As the eyes adjust to the penumbra, the source of inner light that builds harmony awakens. Then you discover that it is you who are inside the picture, on a deserted beach where the successive waves of emptiness and plenitude break. But also where a new world begins.

Pollock advised the young painters to deserteran of the academies and to live near experiences to the Zen. Tapies did it at the end of its trajectory. Bikondoa before starting it. That breath encourages, full of nakedness and truth, in all his work. It does not paint to dazzle and be celebrated by critics. In silence, he practices a total art that takes us to the last step, that of the intimate experience of what the Hindu tradition calls the true reality. Buddhism refers to fundamental emptiness. The Tao sentence that can not be spoken of. For the great creators of the West, as for the mystics, this ineffable reality coincides with the discovery of their purest self and absolute beauty, the light that gives meaning to experience.

The enlightened vision, that sort of ecstasy that can provoke the contemplation of certain masterpieces, is not frivolity, but something as necessary as the bread that feeds us.

Exquisite and essential painter, the best contemporary Basque art awaits us there, near that Enchanted City to which Alfredo Bikondoa’s art belongs in his own right.