Nelo Vinuesa

"Un riu salvatge" encapsulates the most important artistic and aesthetic aspirations of Nelo Vinuesa because it prioritizes freedom and chance, on one hand, and the play and its delimiting instructions, on the other hand, to achieve unexpected results that are alien to prior planning. In previous works or series, the use of play involved completing a preconceived pattern, where the pieces had to fit together in a precise way for the whole to acquire a specific and defined appearance, like a board, for the initiation of the symbolic. In this case, the pieces do not exist in advance, but rather they are formed, growing or diminishing, adjusting to the boundaries of the next one in any direction, which, like that one and like all, is not such a piece, but rather a shape constructed with color and overlapping layers. Or, also, the possibility of being a piece and not being one, the contingency derived from a decision that is its affirmation and negation at the same time, but that in that drift finds the path to follow, its full meaning.

The formalization of this game without pieces, or of pieces without previous forms, serves another purpose, the fundamental one in this case for Vinuesa: to reproduce the faces of a polyhedron he calls a river, "riu salvatge," from a disparity of approaches that end up delimiting a reflection in the mirror. Because the intention, perhaps unconscious, does not seem to be the representation of the river, but rather the conversion of the artist (and his practice) into a river, making it possible through a painting that seems to reproduce the blurry boundaries of the shore in floods; the iridescent reflection of light on the water; the permissive assistance to the seasonal change that always comes more or less on time; the arrival of the night and its rhythm of sounds without clues and colors gradually conquered by black; the zenithal gaze of the flow, as much as the visual accompaniment of those who walk along its edges; the historical, insistent persistence, and here renewed, of the representation of nature in the history of painting.

Álvaro de los Ángeles