Raimond Chaves: La Vida Abstracta de Billy Murcia

Raimond Chaves (Bogotá, 1963) presents an exhibition that compiles various series of illustrations created between 2009 and 2015, among them the piece that gives the show its name (The Abstract Life of Billy Murcia – Murcia was the original drummer of The New York Dolls). Chaves, who usually collaborates with the artist Gilda Mantilla, intersperses periods of solo work in which he concentrates on drawing, a practice which has been ever present throughout his career. The artist conceives this discipline as a multipurpose tool with which to address a wide range of subjects, allowing him to combine various formats, registers and approaches.

For this exhibition, Chaves takes as a starting point the little details and paradoxes which characterise our day-to-day at the beginning of the 21st century, and by means of an oblique methodology in which he doesn’t hesitate to mix the abstract with the figurative, automatism with objectives and difficult times with alienation, he comes and goes – drawing – from the mundane to the transcendental, passing through what is impossible to explain and resisting all attempts at codification. The series of drawings brought together in this exhibition thus suggest a kind of belligerent position which aims to speak in the clearest, and at the same time least obvious, way possible.