Jesús Zurita - Boca de energúmeno

Jesús Zurita holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Granada, where he lives and works. The artist from Ceuta has been awarded the Premio de Dibujo de la Academia de Bellas Artes de Granada [Granada Academy of Fine Arts Drawing Prize], the Premio de Dibujo de la Fundación Centenera-Jaraba [Fundación Centenera-Jaraba Drawing Prize] and the Iniciarte Prize, among other awards. He has held individual exhibitions in museums such as the CAAM - Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno [Atlantic Centre of Modern Art] in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the Museo ABC in Madrid, the CAAC - Centro Andaluz de Arte Moderno [Andalusian Contemporary Art Centre] in Sevilla or the Instituto Cervantes in Tokyo. His work is also represented by galleries in Madrid, Mexico or New York, and he is a regular at the best contemporary art fairs.

His large-format compositions on paper prompt a reflection on nature faced with the challenges to human survival in the contemporary world. Plantlike forms and organic representations, with echoes that are close to oriental aesthetics, invade the surface of his proposals and beget waterfalls, roots, stems or branches that twist and turn introducing an dreamlike dimension of a dramatic nature. His disturbing forests bring about oppositions between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the inorganic, life and death, which are deeply unsettling, as they bring us closer to the final stage of a plant life close to decomposition.

BOCA DE ENERGÚMENO [BERSERK'S MOUTH] JESÚS ZURITA.

My mind, whose architecture inevitably tends to fade to ivy-clad ruins, usually has a will that is far-off from unraveling and understanding what it does not understand. I think of myself as a frog with its astonished look and its jelly-blinking eyes. I look at rage, because there's rage there, and I can feel how it yearns for his rhetoric. The berserk suddenly appears with his lectern and provides rage with specific poetics: he intones starting from a sphincter, a more or less contracted hole, to reach the poorly lit anatomies of the beautiful and the poisonous, where there are no nuances and everything boils down to the pulse.

Berserks make things happen because they invoke beauty in the form of an ointment that permeates everyone it touches. We are all eager for beauty and the beauty that comes out of rage is particularly ravishing because it intoxicates us with its poison, we stop doubting and it doesn't matter if it stings, tears or mutilates us—we will run with a club in our hands and a weak sign in our brains towards the vanishing point that attracts us, that spasmodic and calorific sphincter: the berserk's mouth. I am gathering a few scenes about beauty and poison, about holes and incantations for this exhibition at Galería Artizar, views of what can be seen on stage after so much noise—of the inheritable horror.