Looking at Time
(Eppur si muove)
Juan Bautista Peiró
Polytechnic University of Valencia
It is a common notion that we live in a hurried society. Most of us lead fast-paced lives, dominated by stress. From this perspective, time has become both a scarce resource and a resource scarcely valued. It is available to anyone willing to claim it, but few are prepared to pay the necessary price to enjoy it: stopping. These works by José Antonio Ochoa are a generous invitation to take time—to look, reflect, and savor with eyes wide open, half-closed, or even shut.
The deeply cinematic roots of his work highlight the fundamental importance of temporality. From its inception, cinema revolutionized the integration of space and time, bridging art and life, the external and the internal, the others and oneself. Few disciplines offer such an intense communion of the here and now, merging the spectator with the work. Complementing this in a captivating way, these paintings and drawings by J.A. Ochoa dynamically stir our imagination through material, technical, and compositional devices. They lead us to observe time, which we perceive literally in the form of wisely organized and materialized visual space.
After decades of exploration, experimentation, and hesitation, the dominant cinematic model—what Noël Burch* termed the “Institutional Mode of Representation” (M.R.I.)—unapologetically embraced narrativity derived from 19th-century novels and overtly championed spectacle. With great conceptual honesty and a remarkable economy of means, Ochoa combines a meticulous selection of scenes of particular discursive interest with various pictorial solutions that strike delicately yet firmly at the core of two fundamental dualities in the visual arts in general and painting in particular: space and time, matter and image. Regarding the latter, ever since I first viewed Ochoa’s works in his studio, one reflection by the incisive poet José Ángel Valente has resonated in my mind: debating abstraction versus figuration is pointless, as he concludes resolutely: “matter is form.”
Ochoa’s works allow at least two complementary approaches. The first invites our eyes to traverse the surface of the represented and “read” the images (each one is the result of exhaustive research and documentation). The second requires close observation of the treatment of matter (which, let us not forget, is also form), an educated perception of textures, and a particular interest in detecting insignificant details that ultimately carry extraordinary significance. This activates that material imagination so masterfully explored by Gaston Bachelard, blending almost nocturnally with the gray tones that delve into the deep memory of time turned into space.
Thus, a tiny dark line shifts the scene from a non-film frame and transports us to celluloid worn by mechanical reproduction. Thus, a fluid or interrupted brushstroke enables the wind and time to move through the branches and shadows of a forgotten forest. Thus, these mid- to small-format paintings captivate our gaze, drawing it into the infinite gray that transcends the perimeter boundaries.
José Antonio Ochoa makes us look time in the eye through paintings that, in their resolute stillness, never cease to move.
Juan Bautista Peiró
Polytechnic University of Valencia
*Burch, Noël. El tragaluz del infinito. Madrid, Cátedra, 1987.