Paula Rubio Infante, XYY

PAULA RUBIO INFANTE, XYY
By Elena Vozmediano

RÍEN LOS DIOSES (The gods laugh). Gallery Paula Alonso. Lope de Vega, 29. Madrid.
Until March 26. From 600 to 15,000 euros
ELENA VOZMEDIANO | 07/02/2014 | El Cultural of El Mundo. Printed edition

Paula Rubio Infante (Madrid, 1977) has entered, through various projects, in Spanish prison history. His work is based on a conscientious work of documentation but his work transcends it. The presentation of each of his projects is composed of a small group of «older» works in which he usually combines photography and sculpture, and a more nuanced set of sculptural drawings and models with which he shows the process of conceptual and plastic elaboration followed , As well as the possibilities of developing an ongoing research. His current exhibition at the Paula Alonso Gallery is one of the most impressive he has ever done. Although it has produced more solid sculptures, such as those integrated in the set of works acquired for the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, the amalgamation between the history that is revived here and its expression through the artistic forms is perfect. The plot background is sordid, but includes an aesthetic discovery. Summarizing a lot (I encourage you to go deeper into the story and listen to the recordings at your disposal in the gallery): the artist’s father, who was a prison official, was treated in the psychiatric prison of Carabanchel with Manuel Delgado Villegas, «El Arropiero, «the three times famous criminal: as a serial murderer who confessed 44 deaths (could prove 8), as an object of psychiatric research for having identified in it the trisomy XYY, considered for a few years as a cause of aggressive behavior, and as Paradigm of the incorrect treatment to the criminals «inimputable» because of his mental illness that would rot for life, permanently doped, in prisons-asylum. This unfortunate who was illiterate, suffered maltreatment, prostituted from a young age and ended up being upset in the Legion, has been devoted to various television reports and, lately, a good documentary by Carles Balagué, but has never spread something that Rubio Infante He knows: he had talent for drawing. In Carabanchel, his father wanted to help him and bought him a sketchbook and markers. And the murderer filled the album with surprising compositions, of lively colors, with sometimes archetypal and other allusive forms, according to the artist, to his criminal activity. He shares traits with the outsider art of other mentally ill but has his own personality. Rubio Infante, in whose paternal house is also kept a sculpture of El Arropiero that will carry out the second part of the project, has studied in detail the drawings and has «amplified» them through his artistic work. On the one hand, he uses in the photographs of the scene of one of the assassinations the resource of bilateral symmetry, typical in the digital image more easy but very pertinent here, since it refers to the Rorschach test: it is the image as a trigger for interpretations Which reveal the psychic functioning. More original is the application of this same tactic of unfolding in two of the sculptures, in which it reworked the shape of the sail of a ship (in it uses fabric for the first time, giving it a «solid» appearance) and in a less literal one , Centered on an architectural detail that appears in a photograph of an old border post between Italy and France (El Arropiero traveled half Europe) and is already related to the sculpture mentioned, combining the concepts of mask and «hole»: in the Psyche, in the isolation room, in the system. All that in outsider drawings is color and vertigo becomes darkness and heaviness in the work of the artist. Cement, iron and ash that materialize the disturbed and sad universe of the «tramp of death».

Elena Vozmediano published on 7.2.2014 in The Cultural of El Mundo.