Madrid. “The planet owns us”. Rubén Martín de Lucas on showcase

At the Galerie BAT Alberto Cornejo the Madrid artist Rubén Martín de Lucas is on showcase with the exhibition entitled “El Jardín de Fukuoka”. The new work of the founder of the urban art collective Boa Mistura is inspired by “The one-straw revolution”, the book written by the Japanese philosopher-peasant Masanobu Fukuoka. Japanese philosopher was for “natural agriculture” method, based on “not doing” and the Taoist “wu wei”: do not force anything and do not intervene. A place where human beings are an integrated part of nature and not differentiated as we often see. The artist writes: “One of Fukuoka’s most interesting ideas was the parallelism with today’s society, in which we continuously and tirelessly try to have everything under control: cities, fields, livestock farms ... the result is a broken world”. Just this book, according to the artist, revolutionizes the perspective between nature and man: “We do not own the planet, it is the planet that owns us.” It is a change of perspective, a Copernican revolution that the artist paints in his paintings.

The exhibition is divided into two series, very different and in some ways opposite. Les Monocultivos “contained and systematic paintings, just like a haiku, in gray and monochrome tones. They are subtle harmonies that do not come into conflict with the coldness of the work. An allegory that works for aesthetics and conceptually”, writes journalist/critic Alejandro Basteiro in the exhibition booklet. In the second series instead “El jardin de Fukuoka” the artist materializes the ways in which the philosopher has inspired him, through the addition of a more chaotic and colorful organic composition, in which stains and graphism take the place at the edge of the canvas.