El árbol de los frutos diferentes

It includes pieces made between 1992 and 2010, some of which have never been exhibited before, and explores several unknown aspects of his work. El árbol de los frutos diferentes creates a landscape built from a geometry of the imagination.

The title neatly sums up the artist’s philosophy, based on the metaphor of a tree whose branches connect disparate elements that spread out in space to form a single structure with infinite aspirations. His El árbol de los frutos diferentes has nothing to do with representing a landscape or the image of the tree of paradise; it is a strictly mental construction. The artist arranges the parts that build the tree on an imaginary panel that spreads out across the wall, making it part of the work itself.

In the catalogue, Martí Peran talks about the art of tabulating, understood as placing and distributing parts on the available space, like a secretly arranged constellation. Small shapes acquire new meanings when joining a bigger construction. The result is a fractal-logic structure, where different elements are repeated and split up to create visual sequences and other grammatical forms.

Yamandú Canosa’s work is the result of a theoretical reflection based on the inability to understand the world through its representation, which leads him to stretch it out across panels. The definitive tool for resolving the dialectic between the shattered world and its scattered understanding stretched across the panel is the h line, the usual line he uses to divide his compositions into two hemispheres.

The h line, although settled on as the conventional idea of the horizon, is not about articulating a landscape, but serves as an axis for consuming affinities and a limit where the world of appearances lives by the game of the imagination.

Born in Montevideo (Uruguay) in 1954, Yamandú moved to Barcelona in 1975. Exhibitions such as those at the Joan Prats gallery in 1980 and 1983, Bèstia at Palau Marc in 1984, Hotel Nada at Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in 1993 and Nuevas cancionesin 2004, amongst others, have cemented his place on the city’s cultural scene.

A certain nomadic streak has led him across Europe and the United States, but he has always made longer or shorter stops in his hometown; in 2007 he was awarded the Pedro Figari Award in Montevideo in recognition of his achievements. He has taught at the Escola Eina and Escola Massana art schools in Barcelona and the Otis College of Art in Los Angeles, worked with the Association of Visual Artists in Catalonia (AAVC) and helped set up the Hangar project – all proof that his commitment to culture goes above and beyond his work as a painter.