From the other side

Something More than Paint

Since his initial works, Antonio Núñez has shown interest for the fragment. His works give an image in which the elements that make it up seem to have been chosen accidentally, following the surrealistic idea of the umbrella and the sewing machine on the dissection table. By saying this I mean that he is a lover of symbolical constructions, de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing a sign in a space that is not his own, an environment built with other signs that have also been isolated and whose link produces new laws. The resulting images are a metaphor of his personal experience, because they are closely related to the fact that since 2002 he has been living in Germany. This has influenced not only the coexistence of apparently incongruent codes within the work, but also his interest for the western consumer society in any of its possible aspects, since his series have involved from the product itself to the advertising strategies. He has a wide painting production, but in addition he has successfully broached engraving, photography, installation. However, he prefers contaminated forms, since one of his trends consists of violating the constituent laws of each one of them in order to make their borders less perceivable. De la otra cara (From the Other Face) brings together painted pieces, but from a non-traditional perspective, exploiting expressive possibilities that bring him close to the installation. Although it might seem bizarre, he has filled the space with canvases presenting disturbing figures from the world of cinema and advertising posters. He likewise incorporates motifs that repeat themselves untiringly, which in turn operate like a kind of noise in the system with similar aesthetics to that of gift wrapping. He uses the collage technique and at times recreates it, using the paint itself to give the variegated and convulse effect of the posters and publicity ads that are glued, torn off, and whose images all get mixed up in a rarified atmosphere. The characters, which at times address the visitor or else are imbued around the piece, have been drawn from their original story and relocated in a different one which the public will gradually discover, since his approaches are far from being axiomatic, in fact he is not in the least interested in the author’s intention. His works possess an ambiguous, mysterious aura that leaves the spectator with the wish of always knowing more about the representations and lead him to invent himself a world in which there will always be something more than paint.

By Chrislie Pérez