Artist Book by ROBERTO NOBOA
The work of Roberto Noboa (Guayaquil, 1970) can be understood as a space to observe human behavior. Known as much for his paintings of tennis courts and abandoned palaces as for his ‘flesh children’ and deformed chickens, in his work disturbing scenes are constructed whose captivating backgrounds are – above all – an invitation for thought. Expressive in style, and using a spectrum of colors that range from the most vibrant to the darkest, his work transmits imagery loaded with implacable sincerity.
Noboa began his career in the early nineties, when the local contemporary art scene focused its attention on works whose predominant themes were social problems and political situations. Always an outsider in relation to these contents, the artist never abandoned his exploration of the formal values of painting either, persisting in his search for the possibilities of the medium, and understanding it as a space for expression and relief in which one’s own experience converges. with a particular look towards a social environment rarely addressed in Ecuadorian art. Today, his work has become an undeniable reference for the generations that have succeeded him.
This book provides an unprecedented approach to the artist’s work through more than 250 paintings, drawings and sketches. Here are many of his most notable and characteristic works, but the selection also allows us to explore a much less known Noboa, which places his production as a corpus still open to study and interpretation.
To delve deeper into her world, the publication has the contributions of three curators and art historians who have closely followed her career: the book opens with an introduction by Mónica Espinel that counterpoints key moments of her creation, then gives way to an essay critic of Lupe Álvarez whose main focus of study was his notebooks, series and unpublished works; and closes with a frank conversation between the artist and Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers, an exchange that illuminates little-known aspects of his upbringing and how these are woven together and manifested in his works.
These pages cover Noboa’s production based on an unconventional thematic organization, through four gallery-chapters that in various ways put his paintings in dialogue. In the first, titled They threw chairs, we find works that outline his interest in childhood as a stage of innocent impudence and impunity in which freedom is exercised in a—to say the least—radical way. The gallery In the wrong place gives an account of its treatment of space, followed by Neither Cold nor Heat, where works that highlight duality as a concept are brought together, to close with That’s where they passed, a collection that highlights the presence of the characters—from animals to monsters—that populate his paintings. Although many works can be related to more than one of these themes at a time, these groupings outline suggestive ways of approaching the artist’s work.
RRP $70
Buy directly from the publisher at 0994075871