Fernando Ureña Rib's series of stroboscopic drawings eloquently
describe movements in space: psychological as well as physical
space. The viewer is at once presented with images of movement,
of an overlapping continuum of frozen motion. Ureña Rib's nudes
jump and bend with a visual stutter, a staccato progression that
has the disquieting effect of a film projector slowing to a
breakdown.
In the strange aura of this slow motion, stop-action movements,
Ureña Rib introduces a veritable Pandora's Box of subliminal
images. Ureña Rib's visual puns (women whose faces become birds
with alarmingly human eyes), awaken the nightmare dream reality
that seems to recall the ancestral animal elements within the
human mind: Toes become tail feathers, human profiles transform
into subtle animal images.
In a few drawings, the images of the bourgeois dressed male
figure: flowered tie, cufflinks and button-doe collar gives away
to primordial bestial howling. Visions of the ancestral beast
seem released from a delicately held glass of wine. Clothing is
a dignity that is but a pasteboard mask over feral longings.
Ureña Rib's pits civilization against raw animal nature. He
symbolizes the bird as a pre-conscious dream image of a woman in
these drawings.
One drawing shows a woman-tender, precious and fragile as the
bird she cradles, another portrays a woman as she becomes in an
unsettling progression, rapacious bird from another reality.
This counterpoint, this ambiguity challenges the viewer and
lures him to examine his own nature and subconscious bestial
instincts.
Ureña Rib's is known as sculptor. His drawings reflect the three
dimensional conceptualizations of a sculptor's mind. The works
write in space, their planes and facets seem almost chiseled;
revealed this way and that as they comfort. Always there is
motion: The figures in motion in space and transformation.
This body of works is a tour of the interaction of movement and
transfiguration. On psychological level, it is a gadfly that
prods the animal, sometimes brutal within us.
With sweeping grace, Ureña Rib's multiplies the incubus-like
lures us into dark forest images. We experience the dreams of
animal reincarnation. The drawings intrigue the eyes for the
well-formed sirens that populate Ureña Rib's works are unlikely
guides to this seemly Egyptian Pantheon of animal ancestral
deity.
The subtleties, visual puns and subliminal references are the
special pleasures of his work, which tease the mind and emboss
themselves on the subconscious.
STEPHEN D.KAPLAN
ALTOS DE CHAVON.LA ROMANA. NEW YORK
