José Antonio Ochoa: Dwelling in the Landscape
Rosa Martínez-Artero
Polytechnic University of Valencia
“There is a time for the evening under starlight, A time for the evening under lamplight (The evening with the photograph album)…”
–T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
We return, the air suddenly envelops us, and the eye finds its horizon. The landscape is still there, but its distance has become palpable, as if we were approaching a Quattrocento painting with its blue mountains. Recognizing the steps, the aroma, the dreams of old nights awaiting our rest, the flavors, the birdsong, and the voices of the street may be a way of inhabiting, suddenly, memory in the present. Another landscape lies behind us. To describe it, we show photos that fix it in our memory. The images are imbued with the moment, the light, the city’s noise, the scent of the sea, and suddenly, they evoke the emotion of having dwelled in that place, of continuing to inhabit its remoteness within the confined space of paper.
There is talk of an art of distance, a way of engaging with the emotional dimension of landscape contemplation. Dwelling in a landscape is, in some way, entering the spiritual. The presence of the landscape I see and the presence of the landscape I recall in images can be equivalent when conditioned by emotion. I then recognize the present, inhabited by memory, as well as the revisited aesthetic experience.
Querétaro welcomes the work of José Antonio Ochoa, opening the doors of the Museum of Art, MAQRO, to host his pieces fresh from Valencia, Spain, where the artist completed his academic training at the Faculty of Fine Arts of San Carlos. Left behind are Europe’s diverse landscapes, from the Mediterranean beaches to the misty woods of Sweden or Finland’s mountains. The exhibition Ut Pictura Kinesis: Cinematic Silences,
Antonio Prete’s Treatise on Distance has played a significant role in the development of this project.
Paintings of Celluloid presents Ochoa’s artistic project centered on cinematic landscapes with pictorial resonances.
Concepts like beauty and silence are key for viewers to engage with the works. The mystery of the landscape lies at the core of the theme. In addition to appreciating the technical rigor of the work, we are invited to share an attitude toward life.
This is young and daring work—young because its horizon is both clear and utopian; daring because, to reach that horizon, José Antonio Ochoa brings painting into dialogue with other contemporary representational languages—cinema, in this case—and claims the dialectical nature of the image with the intent to provoke.
Ochoa is an artist who has previously worked with and exhibited paintings focused on the human figure and the landscape. He defined his interest in the gaze of the painter and the viewer in the beautiful series Sunday at the Art Institute (2015), where his figures, seen from behind, first appeared. On this occasion, his work balances the representation of traditional figurative painting—with its themes and treatments—and its conceptual engagement within an intertextual context: a cognitive and emotional transmission through imagery that the artist uses to present his perspective on the world.
The wound we experience comes from the beauty and silence of his landscapes—and previously his portraits—in contrast to the so-called “wheel of the world,” from which everything and nothing interests him.
Youth, as I mentioned, but tempered and matured by the craftsmanship of painting and the awareness that through it, the mystery of things can be pointed out and revealed. This entails choosing from the world what drives life and discarding the cultural imperatives that constrain and limit us. Hence, his courageous stance against the inertia of the art system.
Ochoa paints, therefore, driven by beauty, serenity, harmony, and peace. Yet from this beauty, serenity, harmony, and peace, he warns and challenges us. He employs this form of painting—layered, meticulous, silent, and resistant to trends and spectacle—as an unquestionable weapon of pictorial matter, silently cast toward the viewer.
On the museum walls, we encounter landscapes and, perhaps, the figures that inhabit them. His characters step into the empty landscape or observe it from their small individual scale, where the house, the animal, the car, the tree, and the low grass each have their modest place. Ochoa delves into and expands the space of nature, magnifying the distance between the individual and the horizon through this representational scale, evoking a sense of transcendence.
It is not an over-interpretation to say that his work addresses the awe of recognizing the vastness of a sublime and silent landscape that reflects our own interior landscapes, inviting us to enter and dwell within them.
Ut Pictura Kinesis: Cinematic Silences, Paintings of Celluloid is an exhibition rooted in cinema, inspired by filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov, Terrence Malick, and Zhang Yimou. It reflects on cinema’s documentary capacity versus the subjective nature of painting. This documentary element and its content precede Ochoa’s oil painting process, shaping its conceptual essence.
The frozen frames, which Ochoa renews and intensifies through painting, summon the presence of the landscape from the artificial nature of the cinematic image. This creates a postmodern Romantic vision of the landscape, at the height of media power, denouncing the impoverishment caused by the homogenization of dominant thought.
This vision, no longer innocent, softly wounds us at first, and then deeply. Through the contemplation of these paintings, we experience a sense of loss—perhaps irreparable—for the individual who can no longer inhabit an original vision. Yet despite this, Ochoa invites viewers to contemplate his distant landscapes from the uncertain
The title of the project comes from the Spanish filmmaker José Luis Guerín, who gives a new twist to the phrase by the poet Horace Ut pictura poesis (“As is painting, so is poetry”) and transforms it into Ut pictura kinesis. The Horatian phrase, originating from Simonides of Ceos—”Poetry is painting that speaks, and painting is silent poetry”—equates both arts, not only for their ability to produce aesthetic pleasure but also for their capacity to represent the visible. Guerín’s phrase—”As is painting, so is cinema”—suggests that cinema has taken on the aesthetic experience and the mantle of representing the visible; it is now cinema that documents life. While painting has ceased to be exclusively a representation of the visible, this does not mean it has lost that capacity. Precisely because it still retains this ability, this project allows us to explore the relationship between painting and cinema through the medium of painting itself. Referring back to Simonides’ phrase, we could say: “Cinema is painting in motion, and painting is cinema suspended in time.” In this sense, we use the term Ut Pictura Kinesis. (José Antonio Ochoa C., Ut Pictura Kinesis. Cinematic Silences. Paintings of Celluloid, master’s thesis, Polytechnic University of Valencia, p. 7).
vantage point of a window, the edge of a path, the corner of the canvas, or the seat of a movie theater.
Paintings like Mist, Railroad, and Home exemplify this idea:
“Cinema has already constructed this image and its entire sequence within the atmosphere of a painting set into motion.”
What does a landscape extracted from a film, transferred to print, and finally rendered in oil on paper tell us? In this exhibition, José Antonio Ochoa has crafted an artistic project that clearly advocates for creating images filled with beauty and emotion. Through these landscapes of distant lands, he evokes both the present and its transcendence, aligning himself with a sensibility shared by contemporary artists like Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell. Works such as The Weather Project (2003) or Skyspaces (2005), which Ochoa admires, similarly invoke the sublime and update its relevance in modern times.
Ochoa’s attitude as an artist is a stance of resistance against the culture of production and consumption and its dehumanizing inertia. His works propose change and reflection, urging viewers to move in a direction opposite to the paradigm that consumes us. As Paul Valéry wisely reflected, perhaps art can reclaim its sacred nature and its “uselessness.” Similarly, Ut Pictura Kinesis draws from an art of imagery, with notable Spanish figures such as Chema López, Alain Urrutia, Hugo Alonso, and Simeón Saiz. The dialectical nature of the image, its irrefutable connection to iconographic memory, and the construction of visual thought are central to Ochoa’s artistic and intellectual investigation. Cinema and painting have exchanged their documentary and aesthetic authority to the point of intertwining, as seen in these beautiful painted frames.
“We turn to cinema not only for our passion for the seventh art but because the images we’ve found in film have captivated us to the point of wanting to suspend them in time, to enjoy them outside their movement, time, and space; to contemplate them—not as one would with cinema—but in pause and silence… Another reason to use cinema rather than nature as a reference is its ability to tell stories through images. Narration, mystery, and characters have been essential in realizing this project.”
José Antonio Ochoa C., Ut Pictura Kinesis. Silencios de cine. Pinturas de celuloide, op. cit., p. 48.
Cinema slows down in Ochoa’s work, revealing an emotional dimension akin to in praesentia contemplation. Loss and beauty intertwine in these paintings, filled with a foreseen nostalgia. The rediscovered and re-lost landscape is found once more in the aesthetic experience of art. It might seem paradoxical, perhaps, this dystopia of a constructed landscape as a symbolic object and the individual who contemplates it as a metonymic index, as well as the experience of presence through the experience of art. However, by relentlessly normalizing the image in the globalized society in which we struggle to live—a society on the verge of confining itself to a common imaginary devoid of any trace of individuality—this contradiction becomes, in itself, the very issue that unsettles the artist. Perhaps art today creates an already aestheticized simulacrum that is the only source capable of eliciting emotion, in contrast to the living source of a world that, at great speed, is losing its ability to serve as a refuge.