Heriotzera arte (2013) Painting by If

A Bordeaux School of Fine Arts alumnus and Basque pro-independence leftwing activist currently subject to a European Arrest Warrant – and for the very same reason separated from his companion, iF (1977 - Baiona) is to be counted amongst the holy terrors of painting.
In early 2010, he starts Inkontzientearen Adierazpenak (Expressions of the Unconscious), a series of large semi-figurative, pulsatile and colourful acrylic paintings. All the elements of his vision are already surfacing here: the bright and almost primal hues, the extravagant shapes, the intricate relation between colour and drawing alongside with their relevant disharmony. The political, poetic, loving, daily subjects are barely perceptible, only their bistability makes sense, only their emerge matters.
In 2011, Arrak eta Garrak (Males and Fantasies) is the new series that sets off scandal and faces censorship. Solitary salvation, declaration of lust to the imprisoned lover, the disorderly shapes have become actual bodies – virile, turgescent, fiery, Promethean bodies. But while Inkontzientearen Adierazpenak praises a colour imagining its shape, Arrak eta Garrak praises a flesh enchanting its pigment. In every painting, political subtext and carnal criticism mingle to display some unfinished and desirous bliss.
In 2012, with Isilduak (the Silenced Ones), iF initiates a new technique of paint-pouring on wood, isurketa, where the fluids are ironically and artistically maintained and constricted – up to controversy. Here, desire gives way to condemnation, and lust to dissent. The artist's intentions have changed, but his style remains. Dismembered, flawed, somehow funny bodies satirize what is left of their torture, what is preserved of their slavery. Spinelessness, aborted identification and anonymous violence border the absurd: our existence is curtailed, joy is yet another wound, and all that is left is the mute shout of the painting, as if isolated in a solitary ecstasy, as if gloomy evidences of evicted freedom.
iF offers us a vision that refuses to be seductive. Behind the fallacious simplicity of his works, the serial approach of allied tensions gives priority to the subversion of artistic codes by experimenting puzzlement and emotion in the process of interpretation: the very same colour can flirt and flick, the same line can ridicule and glorify, as to deny representation itself, for the pleasure of the viewer, whose eyes are at once hurt and renewed and indelibly moved.

John-Patrick Castet

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : 1977
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists