The twentieth century was that of the great arts revolution. Music, poetry, painting and sculpture made the canon jump, so that nothing would be as it was before. In a few years Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Surrealism and Dadá coexist, sometimes convulsingly, in the magmatic space that will be what we call contemporary art since then. A sign that will have no other common space than the frontispiece of the new museums.

At the same time, proposals that propose the space of the galleries and museums as a scenic space appear as avant-garde: happenings in different modalities, fluxus with their body and object assemblies, which end up amalgamating in what was called facilities .

The 21st century of which we have been walking for a few years is in the greatest degree of disorder, of entropy to put it in a pedantic way. The disorder has never bothered me, quite the opposite, but the confusion. The confusion is unintelligible noise . Every time the noise is more aggressive and the absence of an intelligent conversation, a great loss.

Such a conversation requires that the words we use have the same content for those who talk, because we are at a time when artistic language, from its origin, the artistic, is exaggeratedly polysemic .

The starting point I propose is to forget schools, trends, avant-garde and other academic taxonomies and to propose that what we do as creators is based on the dichotomy emotion or reflection . A proposal in the manner of the legendary Accademia florentina who, trying to create a scale of pictorial values, raised the dilemma between disegno or colore . Between drawing or color. Both were equally valid, but which one had the primacy? Naturally, the game ended in a draw, but it originated a conversation of extraordinary depth.

Returning to this moment we can clearly identify two territories: one that originates from reflection, which uses what McLuham defined as cold media: photography, video, television, objects as assemblies that are self-named as facilities, interventions, performances. And with very denotative titles such as "a reflection on", "a proposal on", "an investigation on" ... The viewer is asked to reflect.

The other space is that of the works that are created from the hand-brain connection, a neural connection that produces drawings or paintings in the broadest sense. Its engine is emotion and what it tries to provoke in the viewer is precisely emotion.

Emotion and mystery is what I look for in my work. And it is where I recognize my true contemporaries, in the rocky vaults of Altamira, in the Mesopotamian scribes, in pieces of cloth with Berber drawings , in the illustrations of the Blessed, in the ox head painted by Goya, in the watercolors of Paul Klee and the Malevich canvases.

The chronology has nothing to do with affinities, it is only the space that orders the manuals of art history, a story that should cease to be an open and complex, horizontal story, in which each of us is Likewise. That seems to me to be the objective of the artist before his work. And from the viewer who accepts it as an opportunity for joy and introspection. Creating and sharing creation is what makes us more human.

The space of reflection and that of emotion coexist without problem for the viewer, but in their dynamics they generate a distortion in cultural criticism and some confusion in the market of collecting and in the strategies of museums.

The contemporary would be in the reflection, while the emotion is wrapped with a nostalgic veil. Veil that is a consequence of the survival of a perception, still romantic, of artistic creation.

Between the author and the work, the critic is opting for the author. In recent years there is the edition of thick biographical volumes about the relevant artists in the late twentieth century. Pollock, Rotko, Miró, Kieffer and many others, for example, have a powerful work and irrelevant biographies from the perspective of creation. Stripping the author of aura and deepening creation seems like a reasonable proposal. It is a matter that interests me in a very personal way. In recent years I have abandoned the conversation with critics and historians in favor of open thinkers and neurologists.

My personal experience is that it all starts with a neuronal storm that simultaneously activates my hand and my brain. From that moment on, the process that begins is unpredictable and complex, somehow directed by me, through some areas of my deep or immediate memory. I never draw or paint what I am seeing, but what I think I have seen. That in turn I modify as I go. I leave no room for aesthetic routines. Large formats or small canvases. Dense colors or black and white. Graphite and oil intermingle. Sometimes words. I look for emotion, something inexplicable.

Alberto Corazón is a painter. Until the end of January he exhibits his 'Graphic Work (1968-2018)' at the Carlos de Antwerp Foundation.

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