• Title: Wall Drawing 2022.Dallas
• Art and Project: Juan Carlos Olabe and Xabier Basogain
• Technique: Painting on metal panel
• Size: 225 cm x 150 cm
• Date: March 2022
• Location: south-east staircase on the first floor

Wall Drawing 2022.Dallas is a work of art that uses a minimalist language created to provide the visitor/viewer a new set of visual experiences

Human visual system: the human visual system is based on a hierarchical set of functional layers. For example, families of neurons in the primary visual cortex detect the orientation of edges or bars of light within their receptive field of the retina. This information in processed by upper layers of the visual cortex to recognize simple patterns such as triangles and quadrilaterals.

In order to recognize a face, a word in a written text, or the shape of a new table, the basic edge detection of the primary visual cortex is processed by successive layers of the visual cortex with increasing image processing complexity. This process involves information that it is not present in the retina. This includes our memory of millions of images that our memory has accumulated throughout a lifetime, the context where the images appeared and how they relate. For example, we walk, birds walk and fly. A sheet of paper also can fly, but this requires an invisible wind. 

Language: in this work, Wall Drawing 2022.Dallas, we provide the mind of the viewer/visitor a new language of image representation. It is a simple language that our minds learn without effort and provides the viewer/visitor new visual experiences.

Wall Drawing 2022.Dallas is a work of art that uses a minimalist language with two unique elements:

• straight lines and simple polygons

• the simple polygons are in only two colors (magenta and orange)

The viewer / visitor / perceives through this simple language

• a 3D figure (without the use of perspective, shadows, or color gradation)

• a real animal of nature (not a collection of geometric unrelated geometric figures)

• a well-proportioned animal, elegant, with a recognizable pose

Artistic Paradigms: Wall Drawing 2022.Dallas is a work in which we experiment with two artistic paradigms.

1. The first artistic paradigm is the appreciation of a work of art at two levels, the local and the global. In this work, at the local or micro level (when the visitor approaches the image) there are experiences of contrasts of two colors and basic geometric shapes (triangles, quadrilaterals). At a global, or macro, level, there are experiences of structures (head, body, legs, tail, horse). Patterns of colors and shapes are seen that identify the different structural elements of the work. In the macro view, the viewer unifies sets of simple polygons automatically, unavoidably, without effort, and without geometric ambiguity. Local and global experiences are of a completely different cognitive and aesthetic nature.
2. The second paradigm experiments with the differential and integral essence of the images of the natural world through the shapes and geometric structures that represent them. In a discretization process, the three-dimensional structure of a horse is broken down into 132 primitive elements (triangles and quadrilaterals). In the integration process, a discrete set of primitive elements (irregular polygons) are combined to form a superior structure (head, body, legs, tail, horse). This artistic experience conveys to the viewer a fundamental idea that they will never forget: everything is a set of parts, and a set of parts make up a whole.