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Based in Barcelona since 1976, Patricio Vélez (Quito, 1945) studied architecture in Paris and painting and drawing at the Eina Escola de Disseny i Art in Barcelona. Based on his own observations of the behaviour of the natural and, above all, botanical world, since the early eighties he has developed a unique calligraphic syntax to explore possible ties between abstract lines and the memory of visible reality. These subtle organisational forms (fruit of his study and observation of nature in Tenerife, Barcelona and Brazil, among others) have managed to free his drawing from structural values and endow it with kinesthetic qualities in order to capture the contingent energy in the world, aware of what its formal systems both offer and hide. Furthermore, they have equipped it with the topographic skills to define force fields in the restless movement in the way actions and forms are made up.
The artist explores the possibilities of presences as dialectal surfaces of matter-light that reveal analogies with micro- and macro-visions of the world that find their way into the free act of representation. To do so he makes use of painstaking processes of ink drawings and the unusual technique of oil pastels. His observations of plants lead to weightless images that grow, expand, float and divide in an unpredictable syntax of naturalistic analogies. In this way, he redraws new universes that call for fresh perceptions, helped by a complex yet essential syntax of unusual links, blurs and superpositions that provide unexpected diversions of the image towards another possible description of the world of forms, freed from the orthodoxy of a single definition, in calm correspondence with the fluctuations of feelings themselves.
Teresa Blanch