I can’t help it: I really like Suso Basterrechea’s work. I like it because I probably see myself in it, because I see his work and I share with him that love for the history of art and for social history, for journalism and politics, for the vignette and the written word. And Suso Basterrechea never disappoints me, because he inscribes his painting in the vital impulse of people, in the daily routine of our lives and everything that affects them. And because he does it in the form of quick thoughts, where text and image complete each other, and argue with each other. Which is why his wallpapers look like posters, sometimes like haikus and many other times like sheets of paper fiercely torn from a painter’s war diary. And I like that he speaks of all this with the expansive force of a paintbrush that dominates the paper’s surface, with which he brings everything that is bubbling in his head and in ours to the surface with quick, immediate, forceful strokes, and without a hint of visual rhetoric. I see those big, painted papers and I see his nervous hand in bold pursuit of the fury of his thought; the painting arises from there, as does that essential palette of colours that admits no chromatic fantasies. Paintings made like sketches and notes, like urgent telegrams, like campaign notes spurred on by the frenzy of life. Therein lies the rumble and urgency of existence, immediate and compulsive, as well as sex, politics, art and culture, printed on the revolutionary artist’s flyleaf. A painter undoubtedly stained by his work; whose body and mind are dirtied by the paint he leaves on paper. A physical and mental, carnal and intellectual work. Between painting and literature, between design and politics, Suso Basterrechea demands our attention from the predetermined order of a template with which he labels his subconscious, while his guts are embodied in those colours that drip and convulse, fighting for a better world.
Xosé M. Buxán Bran
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CV. SUSO BASTERRECHEA