Gonzalo Borondo was born in Valladolid (ES) in 1989. Since 2007, he has developed his works in public spaces, elaborating an original idiom of painting and installations closely tied to the sites of his efforts. His art arises from a dialogue with the surrounding context, an ongoing exchange with the memories of the site and the perceptions of its space, both physical and symbolic. The underlying aim of his artistic experimentation is to extend the possibilities of painting into other disciplines (theatre, video-art), supports (glass, straw, walls, ceramics, wood…), and multiple aesthetic techniques (stone engraving, silk-screening). Borondo explores the idioms of the past, recasting them in a contemporary light through a new and innovative approach to tradition.His contemplation of the sacred, of the conflicts inherent in the pairing of man and nature, serves as the cornerstone of his poetics, which he uses to break these elements down, in the course of the creative act, into their most ancestral, instinctive forms, bringing forth a perpetual essence. The artist’s interest in working in public places, in exploring the relationship between art and life, has led him to develop site-specific projects in non-conventional settings, works whose impact on the general public, as both installations and experiences, has been intense. Borondo creates public works of art on an international level. Since 2012 he has held one-man shows in museums, galleries, and other venues in Italy, Spain, France, and England. His latest projects include “Insurrecta” (Segovia, ES, 2020), “Merci” (Temple des Chartrones, Bordeaux, FR, 2019), “Sacrilége” (an opera recital at the Toursky Theatre, Bordeaux, FR, 2018), “Matiére Noire” (the flea market in Marseilles, FR, 2017), “Non-Plus Ultra” (MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, IT, 2018) and “Cenere” (the cemetery chapel, Selci, IT, 2017).

The “Fundamenta I” series is derived from a photograph taken by Gonzalo Borondo that he defines as the still image of a “vision”. It is a snow-capped mountain with trees in the background which, when illuminated by light, emanate a powerful spectrum of colors. The red signs on the trees compose a progression of numbers that, at first glance, seem to create a horizon line that blends into the natural picture. Looking closely, they instead reveal the passage of man and of his becoming part of the immortalized landscape.

This vision has stimulated Borondo with new reflections on the relationships between human beings and nature and between reason and instinct, in which he reads a possible reconciliation between forces that are increasingly in conflict with each other.

Classical architecture imitates the functions of nature, but its means of expression are forced by geometric canons and references that bring the human intellect hierarchically in the foreground, with the intent of subduing and controlling the randomness of everything that is not human.

Sacred sites are no longer natural spaces in woods, plains, and mountains, but become constructions erected in the likeness of man; a tree becomes a column, the sky becomes a roof and the earth is separated from human feet, detaching man and nature in an increasingly unbridgeable manner.

Borondo, therefore, decides to reconstruct the vision that touched in him the hope of a new dialogue, a new coexistence, and empathy that we have forgotten but which is essential to recognize ourselves.

Through different techniques and their combination, Borondo, together with 56Fili, reconciles randomness and rationality without trying to overlap one with the other.

He characterizes opposite elements and creates new links between them: trees and caryatids, archetypes and their anthropomorphic evolution, origins, and their evolution into humanization. In the middle, all of these elements’ numbers appear to unite what has been separated for centuries.

Caryatids are reproduced in series through screen printing. They bring forth human rigor, the univocal vision of a pre-established order, and communicate at the same time, without hierarchy. The accidental style of the monotype speaks to us of a variety of solutions, evolutions, and changes typical of the natural order of things, imagining a time in which woods will become again sacred places and in which man will find a way to welcome unpredictability without fearing it.

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