Antón Hurtado is a Navarrese artist living in Bilbao. His practice is founded on the landscape as a place for meeting and reflection. Antón calls himself a landscape painter, touring through towns and neighborhoods to capture their geometry. For Antón, painting is being in the landscape, looking, studying, reflecting. He gives special importance to the gesture, to the act of painting itself, and the sensations that shape his personal world, always vindictive, expressionist and dissatisfied, as if it were a self-portrait.

Walking through the neighborhood is the name of this set of 9 works selected by the artist for the exhibition. They are pieces made in different trips and tours by the artist where he captures his different visions of the environment that surrounds him. For Antón, all the visuals that he perceives of the landscapes are important, but also the people who interact with him. He always wonders how do they live it? How are things changing?

Antón leaves us with this phrase: “Close to home, not many kilometers away, we can find – if we look hard – those places where we can be ourselves, the individual that everyday life tries to hide. That’s the importance of traveling, not just being a tourist”. And he invites us to encounter his piece. What landscape can you observe?

WALKING, JUST WALKING

Walking. Walking is something simple, basic, essentially

human. Walking as a fitness and mental exercise.

Walking as a way to oxygenate, to reset the

brain. An activity tailored to the body, how

it only requires that: a body. And to take time to

move through a space. Without needing to reach any

site, without apps that measure the walk. Walking.

Walking. In a way, walking like something that we have lost,

something that has been taken away from us. We need to relearn

to walk. Walking as a reunion with the environment and the

vital rhythm, without going out to look for anything concrete, not even

aiming to drift away. Walking without forcing it. Walk

without haste, because haste kills. Walking almost like an exercise

of resistance. Walking as an exercise that frees us, that

sets us free. Walking, in any case, finding,

Finding you, finding us. Encounters and disagreements

in the path.

Walking. Walking as a philosophy. Walking as an everyday exit

like melancholic wandering, like a calm

flight, as an erratic and labyrinthine wandering, as a

manifestation. Walking as a form of escape to become more aware,

at the same time. Walking as an exercise in

autonomy and sovereignty. Knowing how to walk with others like

an exercise of interdependence. Reasonable dialogues. Veriles

and liquid streams. Keep walking.

Walking. Walking as an aesthetic practice. Walking like

a creative exercise.

The perception of the environment through the act of walking.

Recognizing the landscape, external and internal. Sum of sensations

and impressions. Combination of data that is collected,

to interpret and combine, consciously and unconsciously.

Memory games. Shapes, colors, layers. Trees that are

ports, ports that are fences, patterns, repetitions.

Time and subtlety. Everything takes its place.

Compositions between reverie and reality. And when walking

the landscape is transforming symbolically and physically.

To the rhythm of walking.

And stop to rest on the side of the road. That simply.

As simple and complex as just walking.

Walking. 

Ricardo Antón Troyas