All drawing and every painting have their soundtrack. Music predisposes us to work and evasion, a conjunction that does not always work with other activities. Music bursts into our memory, and in this case, Roberto remembers that there was music before he knew the artistic avant-gardes, than those albums with beautiful and haunting images, tasty lyrics and evocative band names (Cabaret Voltaire, The Armoury Show), they introduced him without realizing it into the history of contemporary art. He has been processing this Dadaist and Futurist fascination for years, from Fortunato Depero to the Bauhaus, from the Japanese culture to the geometric art of Manuel Barbadillo or the minimalism of Daniel Buren. Sometimes a song can be the trigger for an exhibition,
the encounter of a new image. Piet Mondrian's obsession with jazz music and Charleston is well known, the music of his time. The decoration and orthogonal order of his study, the syncopated dance steps, they were another way of thinking about his painting, reflections that he also wrote and temporarily distanced him from her to return with more strength and conviction. I think that the spatial and sound order that each one imposes on their workplace influences their painting and says a lot about the nature of those who inhabit it. The pressure of a disorder, rhythmic or progressive music, emptiness and austerity, they can be keys to finding the desired image. There is always a certain liturgy in the preparations for a session. Depending on the activity to be carried out or the anxiety with which one begins their work, one type of ally or another is needed, the choice of the right music can be decisive.
Roberto Mollá's drawings place us again in front of paper surfaces full of small turbulences, edges, potential typographic forms, symmetries, aberrant crystallizations; there is a dynamic structure, a centripetal rhythm sometimes kaleidoscopic where the vibration organizes the lines, contrasting shapes in black and some saturated colors. With everything, there is in his drawings a surprising tranquility and an ability to capture the rapidity of thought so characteristic of music. Immersion in his drawings reminds us that every artistic experience has a synesthetic quality, that our body has several sensory pathways in which one sense can invade another and evoke corporeally felt memories (Siri Hustvedt). Cornered in one of his compositions, Roberto has used a nod to Peter Saville's cover of the Power album, Corruption & Lies de New Order (1983) where the letters of the album title are color-coded. Around here, among his drawings, there are painted slats like beacons that look like the axes of orientation that every frame needs, that all dances claim. The reference of an axis reminds us of the symmetry of a dance. It's time for everyone to dance as much as they can.
