Sometime around May 2008, Jack Rutberg was roaming the exhibits at the Chicago Art Fair when he came across the works of the contemporary Catalonian artist Jordi Alcaraz.  Instantly struck by the Alcaraz’ images, Rutberg revisited the booth time and time again. Knowing Rutberg’s love of rather ambiguous forms where placement and material presence prevail, I’m not surprised that a connection between the dealer and this artist occurred.

In any case, there came a point where Rutberg found himself hesitating, he wasn’t totally convinced because elements in Alcaraz’s works sometimes seemed to border on gimmicks. But was it really so? Yes? No? Maybe? Rutberg slept on it. The answer came quickly the next morning when he returned to the booth and bought every Alcaraz on the walls.

Remarkably, most people who see Jack Rutberg’s Gallery’s current show of Jordi Alcaraz’ works entitled “Traslucido” will probably ask themselves the same question that Rutberg did, is there gimmickry in his art? After all, the first thing the viewer sees on many pieces is what looks like bullet holes shot through Plexiglas coverings. But like Rutberg, it doesn’t take long before viewers reach the conclusion that these things are not, in fact, the representation of frivolous art. What is it that changes the mind of so many once they spend a little time with this artist’s works?

For starters, the viewer soon realizes that the artist is truly exploring a combination of ideas along with material surfaces, and how these transparent, translucent, or opaque surface parts interact with each other. What once looked like bullet holes could better be imagined, at least in my mind, as something more akin to representations of wormholes to other spaces. This is what fascinates me about his pieces, his creating art that exists somewhere in between a flat painting and a three dimensional sculpture while exhibiting the qualities of both simultaneously-- the very thing I find myself struggling with in my own art. It hangs on the walls but, like a sculpture, changes as the viewer changes positions.

Like the Patrick Graham exhibit, Rutberg offers up a great monograph of the artist along with brief essays (brief because each is translated into four languages) by Mariano Navarro and Peter Selz. Navarro is the leading art critic of Spain, and Peter Selz is a ninety-one year old American (born in

Germany) art scholar, curator, and critic who presented the first retrospective of Rothko at New York’s MOMA.

Navarro points out that one sees an overall lightness to the art of Alcaraz, what Peter Selz in his essay terms “ethereal presences.” This lightness can be deceptive because Alcaraz’ use of ink blobs, lines, circles, drips, squares, and other such things in a limited palette of blacks, grays, and whites has a very real solidity and dynamic placement somewhat like a Motherwell (on a smaller scale, that is). On top of this he combines all sorts of materials: wires, glass, books, stones, wood, metal, etc., in what Navarro sees as “…the illogical magic of materials…”

This “magic” is in the tradition of an artist that I consider Spain’s greatest, a rather bold statement on my part considering Picasso, Miro, Goya and many, many others hail from that country. That artist is Antoni Tapies, a virtuoso when it came to creating profundity out of mundane materials. I personally see Alcaraz’s works much informed by Tapies and the “Arte Povera” embraced by Tapies himself.

You can easily see this kinship, as when you compare Tapies’s strings or wires hanging in patterns or squares with attachments to them in his 1972 “Inscriptions and Four Strokes on Sackcloth” with Alcaraz’ 2008 “Dibuix” drawing.  Alcaraz, like Tapies, is an artist whose work more often than not violates the traditional physical boundaries of the walls they hang on. And like Tapies, the same lack of restraint of boundaries between the frames, the Plexiglas, the flat surfaces, and the wall surfaces is a creative playground.  Selz put it perfectly when he stated that Alcaraz “…breaks the barrier of the wall” and ”…conflates the interior and the exterior of matter and space… without resorting to tricks.”

By presenting us with yet another exciting European artist on the heels of a magnificent exhibit of the artist Patrick Graham, Jack Rutberg continues to visually enrich his Los Angeles audience.  For those who have not as yet seen the show, it will remain on exhibit at the Jack Rutberg Gallery through November, an edited version continues through December 24

-Rene Deloffre