Isidroblasco

Isidro Blasco’s art is totally personal. It relates to a form of fractured perspective that allows him a multiplicity of viewpoints as in the Dada-ist constructions of Kurt Schwittters or the analytic Cubism of Pablo Picasso. Although he was trained as an architect, he dates the start of his artistic career to an apocryphal experience during a vacation at his family’s summer home in Bonalba near Alicante in the mid-nineteen-nineties. A distant cousin was attempting to build an extension onto the house and making a complete chapuza, a total mess of the job. Walls did not meet, sinks were tilted, doors made no sense. It reminded Blasco of one of Antoni Gaudi’s wilder constructions, the Crypt for the Colonia Güell by Llobregat near Barcelona, he noted, “because these walls, which weren’t even vertical, had a curved outside and they came to a point like the tip of a knife . . . [The] shape that resulted had nothing to do with the interior.” This aha experience was followed by an equally apocryphal dream where he imagined constructing a similarly anarchic structure of bits and pieces:

All these panels around me seemed to follow a sequential narrative, sticking out from the wall like a relief. But soon it was clear that the division between the separate panels was nearly all erased. . . . They were mixed up, overlapping each other . . . . Some panels were cut out of the wall. Now you could see the structural grid that formed it, so the actual inside of the wall was now exposed. . . . Suddenly my body was ejected from that place, up into the sky. From there I could see the whole thing in a bird's eye view. The construction was falling apart, collapsing onto itself. And there was my mother, standing up, contemplating what was happening from outside and pointing. In the end, it seemed like what was being shown to me was that which cannot be shown, or that which cannot be thought. Because it wasn’t the house that was there anymore, but precisely that construction that had appeared between me and the house.

This rather remarkable vision was followed by his move to New York in 1996 where he lived in a loft in Brooklyn with several other Spanish artists. The loft, too, was a chapuza, and Blasco ended up sleeping in a ramshackle space directly above an equally ad hoc “kitchen.” The structures were of wood and other found materials. In this, the loft resembled the fascinating construction sites outside in the city itself. “They were amazing,” he writes, “with the pipes curving around and the ceilings and walls made out of wood and painted blue. They use big pieces of wood for anything and then they cover everything with more wood, and then they put ‘no trespassing’ tape up, and spray paint a lot of numbers and signs on the walls and the ceilings and the floor, too.”

Blasco’s work is a direct result of these experiences in Spain and New York. He combines disparate objects, wood, wall board, and piping with photography. He typically begins with a vertical perspective, a window or a stairway, and adds photographic imagery in an overlapping, multifaceted perspective as much reminiscent of Hannah Höch as of David Hockney. His interiors of kitchens, laundry rooms, and bedrooms are totally personal. These constructions have that unsettling, shape-shifting perspective of his dreams. His exteriors, however, stem from his peregrinations about New York. He assembles images from building façades and skylines and the everyday details of fire hydrants, trash cans, cars, and trees to produce the experience of walking through the big city where everything seems to happen at once and sensory overload is inevitable. He writes: “I breathe deeply in the streets, in any street, and the cold air penetrates my lungs, like it was the first time ever. It seems to me that just being here is a complete liberation, without father and without mother and everything happening much faster.”

Like many New Yorkers’, his world took a dive when the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11. His artwork became more apocalyptic with images of burning and of fragments that resemble parts of the Twin Towers. His constructions such as Thinking about That Place (2004) and The Middle of the End (2006) are very suggestive of the experience of 9/11. Similarly, little details in Stairs I and II (2007) seem to contain motifs from the remains of the shattered exterior of the towers, and, indeed, the “stairwell” became metaphorically sacred as the escape route for those fleeing from the towers before their collapse. The exterior stairway of the buildings has been incorporated as a memorial into the design of the new Freedom Tower being built on the site of the disaster.

Blasco uses photography to expand his personal vision. It allows him to combine a seemingly unlimited number of visual elements that represent the simultaneity of vision with the shifting perspectives of his constructions. He presents the helter-skelter experience of modern living where everything is happening at once and where life comes at you constantly and from all directions. His photographs and constructions are his way of expressing that experience.