José Luis Nievas
Experiences, memories and aesthetic emotions 201
Tambor del Llano begins a new experience with the presentation of exhibitions, not as a professional gallery but as a unique space that invites artists to exhibit their work. A cultural offer that enriches the experience of staying at our hotel and supports artists to disseminate and promote their production.
Painting, photography and collage
Paintings, photographs and collages. Expression of experiences and memories, aesthetic emotions and outdoor and indoor landscapes, nature or urban landscapes, which are often also mediatic: images and illustrations from the press, advertising, cinema, television, comics or street graffiti.
The aesthetic influences, and the techniques I use, are as diverse as my aesthetic tastes. Painters, illustrators or audiovisual creators since Altamira... Goya, Picasso, Juan Gris, Robert Rauschenberg - and his abstract expressionism to reread classical art, science, social novelties, the polis and life -, Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Shepard Fairey, Steve Powers, Elisabeth Peyton, or the collages of the Chilean Mauricio Garrido...almost all of them iconoclastic, non-academic and groundbreaking aesthetics and concepts from which I copy techniques and appropriate images and spirit. At least I try to.
The exhibition
In the 1980s I photographed villages and uninhabited houses in Ribagorza and Sobrarbe, mainly, but also in other regions of Aragon. At that time, the buildings were beginning to collapse, destroying the architectural, ethnographic and socio-cultural heritage of these territories.
The images evoke memories and recollections of generations who migrated from the rural territory to the urban destination, in the 60's of the 20th century, when news of space travel and the American project to set foot on the moon were arriving.
Lately, when I read that it is the anniversary of the arrival of man on the moon or of other events that had an impact on me as a child, such as the Kennedy assassination..., I automatically remember how and where I experienced that news, the impact it had on my childhood world - on my transition from magical to rational thinking -, on my acquisition of awareness and of the experience of history, in short, on my acquisition of consciousness and of the experience of history.
More recent news and events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in the Balkans at the turn of the century and other disasters of war, I experienced from close to international cooperation and visited their post-battle landscapes.
Cuba, after its independence, experienced with prolonged intensity the utopias that marked the 20th century, the most deregulated market capitalism and the communist dictatorship as a Soviet satellite. Today, like the nostalgia of Eastern Europe, it lives its particular transition with cubalgia: its nostalgic pain for the utopia that did not come to perfection and with its ideological symbols reconverted into souvenirs.
The aesthetic influences, and the techniques I use, are many and very diverse, painters, illustrators, graffiti artists and audiovisual creators since Altamira... Goya, Picasso, Juan Gris, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Shepard Fairey, Steve Powers, Elisabeth Peyton..., almost all iconoclastic, non-academic and groundbreaking artists from whom I copy techniques and appropriate images and spirit.
Trajectory
José Luis Nievas Crespo. Born in Zaragoza in 1953. I have practised artistic photography and painting since my youth, holding my first individual exhibition of photographs in 1979, at the Spectrum-Canon Gallery in Zaragoza.
Subsequently, I have participated in group and individual exhibitions of black and white photography with themes of uninhabited villages, in the Colegio de Arquitectos de Aragón, Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses and in other institutions, galleries and photographic centres.
Later I began to colour black and white photographs with aniline and liquid watercolours, using techniques similar to those used before colour photography. I took courses and workshops with Ouka Lele, the artistic name of Bárbara Allende Gil de Biedma (Madrid, 29 June 1957), a Spanish artist, painter, poet and photographer.
I have continued to combine photography and painting with different procedures, materials and techniques up to the present day, exhibiting my work in different cities. The last exhibition was in 2012 in Lugadero (Seville).
In the 80's I photographed uninhabited villages and houses in the Pyrenees, mainly in Ribagorza and Sobrarbe..., but also in other regions of Aragon. At that time, the buildings were beginning to collapse, destroying the architectural, ethnographic and socio-cultural heritage of these territories.
The images evoke memories and recollections of generations who migrated from the rural territory to the urban destination, in the 60's of the 20th century, when news of space travel and the American project to set foot on the moon were arriving.