EN
ROUTE
Miguel
Osuna’s transportation inspired oil paintings are constructed
as memoirs: visual recollections of the fleeting yet sensuous moments
travelers experience en route. These landscapes highlight the strong
connection between the permanence of the roadway and substantiality
of our own reflections.
In this series of work, Osuna concentrates on the motorway as a conduit
between constructed and natural geography and our visceral recollections
of those spaces and moments. If landscapes record the physical stories
we encounter, Osuna’s interest lies in the long arc of the narrative:
the textural relevancy of what is real, what is remembered, and what
is reconstituted to satisfy our desire to relive the experience we can
never have again.
Osuna is interested in the kinetic resonance of travel’s visual
narrative. He expands the lens so the canvas depicts the big picture,
synthesizing the visual as retrospection, foregrounding the liminality
of both the road and the passage over and through it. What we experience
en route is part memory, part fabrication. The work becomes a dynamic
rendering of the transparency of narrative constructed in the motion
of the highway.
En Route reveals the pathway as a primal element of human mobility.
The roadway transports the traveler from one location to another, it
is not a place to stay, and the transience of the experience mists over
the exactitude of what is witnessed. Osuna revels in this space, using
gradients of color that remove detail so that the viewer focuses less
on the sharper aspects of the road and more on the memory of the encounter.
Despite the watercolor quality of the images, there is no softness in
these oil paintings. There is however, a sensuality that draws the viewer
into the canvas. The smoothness of the brushstroke exemplifies the haziness
of the memory. Each stroke has a place, driving the pigment just so
and solidifying the transient effect, so that Osuna is as much en route
creating the work as the viewer is encountering and reencountering it.
Each
painting in En Route is singular, telling its own story, but collectively
the work represents Osuna’s (and by proxy our own) transitory
connection to Los Angeles as a cityscape that is largely superficial,
skimmed rather than dived in to. Painterly use of light captures the
viscosity of what we remember in the blur of moments, spaced between
locations. The richness of LA is unfolded in the sweeping transition
of light and color on the canvas.
The canvases contain their own gradient of memory: acute recollections
of color and shape to hazy, half forgotten things. These works resemble
a Rorschach memory test where the viewer assigns to the visual a connection
to a prior experience, “I’ve been there, I just don’t
know where there is!”
Osuna’s use of color is an homage to his watercolorist beginnings.
It allows him to capture the crossing in space and time of being en
route, heading to the horizon, into the blue. As we distance ourselves
from the sharp formations comprising the landscape, everything goes
blue and our brains revert to the womb, to the water. And in Los Angeles,
the ocean provides an enormously potent backdrop to our movements.
The paintings in this series evoke the roadway in LA as both a temporal
and permanent backdrop of experience. What was past, what was realized
on the journey still exists in the present, in a narrative referenced
on canvas as one color softly bleeding into another, conjuring a conversation
already felt as much as encountered along one’s way.
Roads are often referred to as arteries, channels of transportation
and communication. Motorways in Los Angeles in particular cut through
the cityscape in drastic ways, providing a convenience and an escape.
Drivers no longer focus on the road, the barely perceptible surface
of experience, despite its incontrovertible permanence, and instead
look ahead to the desired destination. But our brains and, Osuna would
argue, our imaginations are alert, refining the mundane with the specificity
of an artist’s eye. He reminds us of this subconscious process
by painting those memories, as we recall them, on large canvases that
place us both within the narrative of our recollections and the actual
roadways that crisscross LA.
jill moniz, phd |