The exhibition of the artist Roberto Chartam in the Experimental Art Space of Fonseca is more than just an exhibition. In it he invites us to immerse ourselves in a unique aesthetic experience through his intervention in the showroom itself. This has been crossed by a fascinating set of visual routes and direction paths. By means of getting ourselves into this space, it is not our sight that is urged to carry out the proposed route, yet our whole body, actively engaging the rest of our senses. Both the exposed shapes, precise and rectilinear ones, just as the invisible routes and void spaces that are found between them, constitute an active set that invites us to transit through the exhibition space.
By synthetically using several lines of tension in red crossing the empty space, the artist insistently calls upon experiences that we have all experienced to a greater or lesser extent. And that invocation is capable of activating memories and sensations related to tension and unsteady balance between forces that often oppose each other, whether It is natural phenomena (such as gravity or magnetism), or actions that we ourselves unleash, like the tension we exert on our body or the one we project on things.
In order to provoke this universe of sensations, the author uses a plastic element as simple and basic, but at the same time as effective, as the straight line. The geometric perfection and the neatness of the exposed pieces produces a sort of "visual minimalism" that seduces us at first glance. In this way, the simplicity and purity of the forms that occupy the space focus on those lines of force, as if they they would have really been drawn in void.
Through lines suspended in the air, Roberto Chartam achieves to communicate and relate to each other the two rooms that are connected as if they were one. In the same way, the chromatic and expressive parsimony of those layouts allow the prominence of the immaculate white of the pieces, the intense red of the rope (with which he draws that idea of directional tension in the void) and the play of shadows that are projected on the wall achieve all kinds of synergy with each other. The result of this symbiosis is the visual game that catches our gaze thanks to the magic of the trajectories that achieve balance with each other without nullifying its expressive rotundity.
Both the works exhibited on transparent bases and the "aerial” intervention over the room itself, invite us to adopt different points of view from which to observe the sample as we go through it. The pieces that linearly cross both rooms, harmonically following that other visual itinerary of red lines executed from the air (above the viewer's head), as well as the voids that enclose those volumes, allow us to adopt unprecedented approaches to contemplate these works, being all of them equally valid, according to the perspective that we adopt at any moment.
José Gómez Isla
Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts
University of Salamanca