Rafael Fuster

Rafael Fuster - Tribute to Sánchez Cotán

Técnica: Acrylic on fabric

Biografía del Artista: The work of Rafael Fuster (Murcia, 1978) has been characterised from the beginning by a reflection on the limits of perception. A baroque game with the eye of the spectator that questions the relationship between what we see and what exists, the tension between what we think things are and the experience of what they really are. Through meticulous sculptural work, his previous works put this tension into practice. A precise representation of the world that managed to confuse the eye and that called into question knowledge through vision. The hardness and solidity of the metal with which the sculpture was made adopted the characteristics of the ductility and fragility of paper, the objects also of waste that the sculpture represented. Although illusion and simulation were fundamental, it was not a trick of the eye tout court. Unlike baroque compositions where, after the deception was made evident, the works ceased to have meaning, Fuster's sculptures continued to maintain the tension between the imagined world and the real world. When we touched the object – whether by touch or by a haptic gaze – and revealed the supposed deception, the illusory property did not disappear entirely. In some way, the lightness of the paper, its fragility, was still present and we could no longer get rid of it. More than deceiving the eye, what the artist did was project qualities onto the materials that remained there forever. Qualities that are not only physical, but that have to do, at their core, with a series of ideas about the world – precariousness, abandonment, residuality… – that permeate the discourse of the work. The process of “confusion of the gaze” with which Rafael Fuster works takes place through the sharp and precise work of mimesis, but also – perhaps even more so – through the object of representation: the residue. As we have written elsewhere, his work can be understood as an “allegory of residuality”.