Text published for the solo exhibition ‘Chroniques d’un été’ at the Galerie Jérôme Pauchant, Paris, France (2017)
Terencio González started working with figurative painting, often with recycled objects, bricks, wood or simple canvases. Driven by the spirits of Rauschenberg, Basquiat and Baselitz, three artists he refers to in particular, he depicted raw characters from the streets, arbitrary rearrangements, and disconcerting model items all in curves, sharp cuts and unexpected volumes. Obviously men, but without any expression, placed there, locked into their gestures, and often in groups.
He quickly moved on and started preferring squared monochromes of one meter’s length with five primary colors. This way, he is now closer to another artist, whose work he generously looked at and admired, the American Richard Diebenkorn and his series Ocean Park.
But Terencio González is an investigator. He knows how to enjoy every situation he is in: he makes the most of Jean-Michel Alberola’s studio, where he studies at the National Fine Arts School of Paris. There, he learns a lot, how to react to the world, to pay attention to detail, and to render popular topics appropriate. Simultaneously, he decides to awaken his Argentinian origins, his father’s land, where he often stays. There he collects backgrounds of posters made of cheap paper with a specific format, used in Buenos Aires to advertise political messages, concerts or parties. He also works briefly for the city of Paris as a graffiti cleaner, a chance to be directly confronted to walls.
As soon as 2013, Terencio applies on canvas a rich semiotic display from these posters thence increases the implication of forms and colors. His quest is a neat, extremely legible writing, which he uses to define a horizon or to animate the background. This series seems very simple, abnegating contrasts to the set of plans and becoming an abstract blueprint, restricted to only lines of force. But colors make the difference. Numerous, manifest, powerful and vibrating colors like an iridescent arch. With such a composition and conception, the works are rigorous and spare, but explicit with a tension that sometimes reveals some prints of lead letters vocabulary.
However, nothing is fixed. Responding to the colored grid, a white neutral space on the lower part, some horizontal sprayed ribs with the same primary colors as the monochromes. Terencio González lets the color create the final trace of the work. Far from imitating any pre-existing form (even built), the canvas plays on the making, and draws an immediate and underlying presence of matter.
In Terencio González’s work, what is disowned or rather integrated is clearly mentioned: the Quattrocento’s perspective code order, the evocation of a Cezanne-style perspective and its breach. However, the painting’s silence is not a place of no-freedom. On the contrary, the artist brightens our eye and sharpens it. Since the beginning, he devotes himself to the pointless activity of trying to render what nature can do so perfectly, while avoiding all pattern or formal arrangement. If he puts aside all representation, he remains truthful to the frame and pushes the viewer to perceive reality as illusory.
Terencio González knows today, in spite of his young experience, that a painting is not punctually preconceived. He believes in the fabricating action, in the game of assembling, in the self-dynamism of materials, raw or not, in color slowly rising from the canvas. Terencio González constantly and proudly asserts his taste for painting, the light and the sublime. He is, to me, one of the most imaginative artists of his generation.
Françoise Docquiert