Yamandú Canosa is presenting a body of recent paintings at Galería Tomás March in Valencia in which he renews his iconographic repertoire. In his two most recent shows - Nuevas canciones at Centre d’Art Santa Mónica of Barcelona (2004), and ¿Todas las cosas tenían nombre? at Centro Cultural de España in Montevideo (2005) - Canosa devised a personal landscape as a backdrop for various personal issues and formal concerns, introducing us into an evocative poetic universe. For this show he has chosen a number of recent oil paintings which renew his conceptual groundbase with images inviting us to reflect. An airport finger seems like a re-emerging contemporary icon of travelling, while questioning the subjective quality of this transitional space. Posters address the place as a space for representation, or as an alternatively open or closed place. A speaker tries to knock down a wall with his words, with language. A spherical house floats like an intimate, corporal, ancestral space. The body of work on display gives shape to a landscape built out of experiential fragments. Landscape as concept has been at the core of Yamandú Canosa’s work for some years. We just need to think of La línea h, his last show at Galería Tomás March in 2001, which gave rise to a series of installations, including La línea h(la canción del zahorí) at the Museu de l´Empordà, Figueres (2002), and La línea h(iceberg) at Domus Artium, Salamanca (2003).
In La casa de Amanda, the text accompanying the exhibition Nuevas canciones, Yamandú Canosa provided a clue to his relationship with landscape: “Landscape is an abstract construction of the gaze, and the horizon its optical axis. But for art, optics is not merely a set of physical rules. Optics (also) constructs our subjectivity, and that subjectivity helps us to see ourselves from the space drawn by that sentimental education of the gaze. […] Landscape looks at us. It decentres the world, because it thinks us by imagining us. If we understand landscape as all the things that are looked at, it is easy to infer that art thinks us and looks at us. With art, we return to landscape what once belongs to it. A pure ecology of language. If art looks at us, and all things looked at are landscape, we can then safely claim that we are also landscape for the art that looks at us.”
In 2005, Canosa took part in the 2nd Jafre Biennial of Girona. His work is currently on show in the exhibition Picasso to Plensa, A Century of Art from Spain at The Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico.