Pedro Paricio - Exhibition London!

Dairy Of An Artist & Other Stories 2007-2012

20 Sep 2012 – 11 Nov 2012 | 144 – 146 New Bond Street, London “Paricio’s splendid potential has become a splendid reality.” Juan Manuel Bonet, 2012 Diary of an Artist and Other Stories 2007 – 2012 is Paricio’s most ambitious exhibition to date, offering a comprehensive overview of his practice, moving from his early abstract compositions through to his more recent figurative works.

It includes over 50 works including paintings from his recent exhibition at the Casino de la Exposicion (ICAS), Seville, and offers an overview of the artist’s works from 2007 until 2012.

www.halcyongallery.com

Painting is his whole life!

Pedro Paricio was born on January 16, 1982 in Tenerife in the Canary Islands (Spain). As a child, he was always drawing, but at high school he studied science and only began to contemplate a future in the arts a few months before going to college. ‘To be honest, the thing that attracted me was the freedom that society gives to the artist’, he explains.

‘I chose art because I wanted a different life.’ Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, he now feels that the chain of events that led him into art was a process of discovering his fate, his destiny. Paricio enrolled at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, moving on to a course in Salamanca and completing his training with a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona (2004–2006). While at college, he considered a career as an art critic-cum-curator; such essays as Unfinished Articles I and II convey a lucid intelligence that enables him to reflect, for example, on the tyrannical relationship between artistic theory and practice. Paricio was focusing mostly on sculpture, installation and video art at the time of his first group show in Barcelona, Don’t Call It Performance (2004), but shortly afterwards decided to make painting his sole medium; he considers the latent possibilities of painting to be infinite and dismisses the idea of using other media or technology in response to fleeting fads in art. The artist currently divides his time between Barcelona, Tenerife and London. Paricio’s paintings are held in many important private collections around the world, and he enjoys an international reputation following exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States. The Master Painters exhibition at Halcyon Gallery, London, in 2011 made a big impact on the international art scene, and in 2012 The Theatre of Painting, his first solo museum exhibition in Spain, was staged at the Institute of Culture and Arts of Seville. Paricio was honoured to be selected for inclusion in Francesca Gavin’s book 100 New Artists (2011), representing an innovative generation that is forming the aesthetics of the coming decade.

KALTBLUT: What does geometry mean to you? how important is it?

Pedro: Geometry is a part of the world, its construction and its deconstruction, macro and micro. Buildings and minerals, chemicals and constellations are about geometriy. The history of it in art is wide and will say from the perspective in the Renaissance to the minimalism of the 70s through the pre-cubism of Cezanne. In my case I’m closer to an intuitive interpretation than scientific of the same evidence. The human being is about understanding life and this geometric reconstruction take me closer to the truth, and every truth is in the human soul.

KALTBLUT: Whats your view on colours? What do they mean for you?

Pedro: Color is space and time, optimism, happiness, movement, expression. I was born in the Canary Islands, a paradise of light and infinite. The sun there has power colors and suspends the time. One of the first picture I keep in memory is a park bench in a fauvist style. I like all the painters who use colors from Rothko to Matisse, Munch to Rafael. Obviously I also like dark painters like Caravaggio. In the last series in which I am working very dark backgrounds have appeared for the first time, the night.

KALTBLUT: How did you decide to start your project?

Pedro: There is not a completely logical explanation. The series started because I worry about some theoretical issue, formal, historical, human, spiritual, etc. Usually a painting itself enters the beginning of the work group. A painting always brings me to another painting, like a thought leads to another. Then the pictures come, begin to build up in my head one after another and I try to get them out when I feel it is time. There are pictures that go around in my imagination from the moment I started the series and I can only paint when I will spend almost another series. One of the last paintings I’ve done for an exhibition in London I have now, “Diary of an artist and Other Stories”, is one of the first who had conceived painting but for one reason or another did not quite seem or feel wanted. In any case the pictures are not totally preconceived thoughts on canvas. There is conceptual art. My painting is dynamic and is adapted to the canvas, my desires, my eyes, my senses.

KALTBLUT: How has your art changed your perspective on life?

Pedro: Art has not changed my perspective on life, itself has become my whole life. The painting is everything. I live and die for this. It is what gives meaning to my life. It is an obsession, a passion, a joy and a self-imposed sentence. A reward and punishment. Painting is over my own health. It’s a black hole in the universe that sucks you in and takes you to an unknown location from you never come back. If I travel I see as many painting as I can, when I read something it’s almost always something related to art, more than half the things I see on media are art documentaries, if I go to the beach I’ve been drawing material. I always carry a notebook and my fountain pen to scribble or write. I wake up thinking about painting and I go to bed thinking about painting.

Interview by Emma E. K. Jones

The photos of Pedro Parcio are by POL GOREZJE