José Pinto

N.A.S.A.L. presents Ecuatorian artist José Pinto's solo show, La criatura infinita.

"No wonder then if the impulses that accumulate in our bodies escape our knowledge...the whole system of impulses, which is both the architect and director of our body, is hidden from our eyes."
— Jakob von Uexküll

"... invisible progress, on which every visible organism rides during the short interval of time it is given to live."
— Henri Bergson

The infinite creature is the very energy that invades the initial space (being this, at a previous moment, poor and homogeneous in its instrumental recognition) provoking its appearance the activation of multiple environments, guided by vital impulses, which aspire, from their plastic and organic force, to sustain and feed the elements that emerge, complexifying, in this way, what is perceived. A new sphere is thus discovered that penetrates the visual, generating an oscillation between the suspicion of an unfinished story and the glimpse of organisms that move beyond any concrete and immediate delimitation. It is a universe that inaugurates the impossible imagination of the living, through a tiny approximation (in the sense of stopping in the secret holes of the living) that aspires to sketch a surrounding world that declares its physical and complex dimension: interconnection of diverse objects that warn the position of a landscape, which projects a singular and fantastic nature, guided by a blurred and simultaneous subjectivity, accomplice of that which crosses and overlaps in search of ignored volumes.

The act of painting reveals, from its intuitive and diagrammed process, a constant explosion that, through an expansive and terrifying condition, points out the traces of a multidimensionality that delves into the inherent systems that produce the mobility of the disturbing forms. In this sense, a strategy that is thought from the tension invited by the dialogue between painting, video and installation is fundamental: the fixed and the movable, from a border that is recognized as a body interrupted by the irregular waves of the imagined and the touched, yearn to be introduced in the creative chance that breaks with the artificial continuum imposed by the human, replaced by a line that contains anfractuosities.

"... a straight line that seems so at first glance , will also seem, with a little more attention, perpendicular or oblique to the contour.If one takes a magnifying glass, or a microscope, the uncertainty does not vanish, for each time one increases the magnification, one sees new anfractuosities appear, without ever getting to feel the reassuring and clear impression that gives, for example, a polished steel ball." Benoît Mandelbrot

Taking into account the mathematician Mandelbrot, an investigation is made from a notion of non-classical geometry that prowls the anomalous forms of certain objects, which are sustained on a turbulence that demands reconfiguring the relationships between scenery, body (animate and inanimate), and time. A palace of discoveries that, through fluctuations and glimpses of uneven transitions, offers us a painting that elaborates probable intense flows, delimited from the appreciation of secret numbers and constantly growing tides. Unreal paintings that are nevertheless inspired by certain equations of inspired and experimental science: "Ilya Prigogine (...) Instead of a simple and unique form of stability, we have instead multiple forms of varying complexity (...) when a system suddenly changes from one stable state to another (...) minor fluctuations can play a crucial role in the final result." Manuel De Landa

What De Landa suggests to this exhibition is the elaboration of a reflection that, thanks to a displacement beyond equilibrium, finds non-linear behaviors that reveal a more creative and changing matter. This is what draws Pinto's attention, establishing from here, as a pertinence of his proposal, the conversation between painting, object, installation and video, diverse dimensions of a singular history, which insists on manifesting itself from unsuspected assemblages of masses (these, of course, imaginatively transformed into the forms of painting, but keeping the features of their deep participation).

Finally, the exhibition also projects itself into the irreducible wound of the artist, inquiring into the faults that motivate the creative gesture. Once again, the tension between the fixed and the movable, projecting from within the floating traps that dissolve the skin of objects and bodies in a night designed from the wild laws of its own disposition. The breath that blows in the forest; the river and its shadow; glassy sphaera; the escape of a deviant symbol. This is, I suspect, the scheme of the infinite creature.

— Jorge Aycart Larrea, curator