14/09/2007 - 10/11/2007

Throughout his creative development, Óscar Ranz has explored systematically and eloquently the conceptual nature and the expressive capacity of the material and compositive resources of paint. From the accumulation of pictorial layers to carving them up until obtaining the construction of wefts of colour lines, his work has always maintained a coherence based on the comprehension of the picture as a global two-dimensional surface on which the action – not concrete but abstract, in its psychical origin as well as in its materialization, takes place. Seen from this concept of the medium, the resulting work has complete autonomy as object of contemplation; but, at the same time, it is like a sign where to find the sedimentary traces of the creative process of which it is the consequence. Two temporal dimensions are balanced by the author: the one extended along its genesis and the contemplative one fixed in the final object.

With these convictions, Óscar Ranz tackled in 2005 the project of working on a water tank in the town of Bercianos del Real Camino, situated in the province of Leon (northwest Spain), seat of the Operations Centre “El Apeadero”. Defined by the title “Tránsito, residuo y proceso” (Transit, remains and process), it consisted in ripping off and fixing of posters on the surface of the polygonal building, realized in different phases. The painter’s studio work took on a collective and nearly industrial character because of the space dealt with and the materials used. Situated in a context of physical and spiritual development next to the “Camino de Santiago”, the work suggests an artistic movement between architecture and painting: a painted architecture but also an architectonic painting. A work, which is closer then it might seem at first sight to the author’s plastic concept: his painting is basically construction, arrangement of parts emerging from the vague field of sensitivity. The same way, a standardized building becomes the arranging medium of the mentioned sensitivity. The transit that represents this new plastic structure has also another reading: the insertion of a mural image, characteristic for cities, in a rural environment. However, in difference to what happens in these residual urban spaces, using his methodic working system, the author achieves a uniform and harmonic image of what could seem a hazardous development. The result is once again, as in his paintings, deeply contemplative.
            The final phase of this project consisted in photographing fragments of the mural intervention. The artist feels the need to fix in two-dimensionality the original three-dimensional space. It is about veiling again a process, which had been made explicitly. From an a posteriori observation, he made photographs of fragments going further beyond the simple documentation of the project. The photograph becomes a pictorial action by a work of selection which contributes to expanding and detailing the contemplative frame of the original work, but which in turn constructs autonomous objects through its plastic expressiveness and therefore capacity of working also out of context. Painting, architecture, photography. Óscar Ranz transits through different resources, but always from the need to balance the temporal development of the process and its final sediments.