Unwonted Figures

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Some words from Ortega y Gasset’s "The Dehumanization of Art" seem pertinent with respect to the work of García Gutiérrez, as they denounce how often we believe that "to run away from reality is easy, whereas it is the most difficult thing in the world. It is easy to say or paint a thing which is unintelligible, completely lacking in meaning: it is enough to string together words without connection, or draw lines at random. But to succeed in constructing something that is not a copy of the ‘natural’ and yet possesses some substantive quality implies a most sublime talent."

In the works of García Gutiérrez we also find some of the features which Ortega uses to define the 'new art' such as the tendencies to "essential irony" or to "avoid all falsehood and therefore to a scrupulous fulfilment"; even the defining feature may be there too, and that is that the artist would consider art as "a thing without transcendence".

If , Ortega says, "in the most abstract ornamental line a dormant recollection of certain ‘natural’ forms may linger tenaciously", as García Gutiérrez follows his "escape from the human", he certainly arrives in the ad quem terminus to an "heterogeneous wildlife" in which the natural or organic form mingles with the mechanical or artificial , as it happens perhaps today more than ever and it might happen even more in the future. But in these works it is not only the organic and the mechanic that meet, also the fantastic and the experienced or even a classic drawing technique and the spirit of street art found in graffiti.

The originality of this work might, hopefully, bring those already accustomed to abstract art, conceptual avant-garde and post-modernism back to state described and desired by Ortega when he says: "It is possible to envisage living in the company of the things represented in a traditional picture; association with the things shown in the new picture is impossible. In ridding them of their aspect of living actuality, the painter has severed the bridge and burnt the boats which might connect us with our customary world. He leaves us imprisoned in an abstruse world and forces us to confront objects impossible to treat humanly. We not only have to approach these paintings with a completely open mind; we have to create and invent almost unimaginable actions which might fit those exceptional objects".