The Shape of the Idea

Exploring the work of Ahmed Gómez unveils only the tip of an iceberg that, beneath the surface, conceals a multifaceted Renaissance-style figure for whom art is a vital, playful pursuit, mastered with all the tools and tricks of the trade. Ahmed dons and doffs the artist’s cloak at will. His attitude is marked by the detachment and anarchy of a garçon terrible; a kind of incorrigible talent that sets him apart from the traditional path of an artistic career. Painter, sculptor, conceptual artist, thinker, but above all, a maker, he asserts that art is the energy and time dedicated to the creation of the work.

Here, we have the opportunity to view a very recent collection of pieces, which we present under the title The Shape of the Idea. These works maintain a solid coherence among them, which can be enjoyed both as a visual symphony and as an aesthetic essay grounded in the canon of Western art.

Making deliberate use of suprematist concepts, and with due reverence to the founder of this artistic movement, Kazimir Malevich, Ahmed offers a twist on the two-dimensional plane of the famous Arkhitektons sculptures. These appear distorted against backgrounds of gray textures, transforming the assemblages of abstract blocks that form the idea of suprematist composition. They become hints of improbable architectural compositions, which he refers to as Gulag Arkhitektons, in a sort of Malevich Reloaded.

Another part of the exhibition, connected to the previous one, is a formal exercise that embraces the lightness of playful figures represented in basic graphic shapes, with solid planes of elegantly combined colors. However, these astonishingly simple pieces contain the painter's trick, as he intentionally employs a selection of colors typical of classical academic and realist painting, known as the Zorn Palette. The colors of chiaroscuro and depth, typically used to create volumes, now take center stage and occupy the space of the planes, in a joyful dialogue of combinations and harmonies. It is an art game for connoisseurs, subverting the basic colors characteristic of avant-garde graphics, in contrast to the complexity of the classic palette of the academy.

Complementing this collection of paintings are the sculptural pieces, which are a synthesis of many of the artist's previous works. The Techno-Heads and Zoomorphic Transformers allude to the influence of technology on the anatomy of bodies, featuring a techno-industrial aesthetic that evokes more of a vintage robotic visuality than that of a contemporary digital cyborg. The sculptures clearly engage in dialogue with the pictorial representations, creating a bridge between volume and plane.

In an era of overexposure to art, with excessive narratives and meta-artistic discourses flooding the creative act with social content and cultural and identity-based theses, Ahmed takes a conservative stance. His art, which he prefers to call anti-discursive, reduces narrative to pure aesthetic concepts, as the artists of the avant-garde once did with their “non-objective” art, thus freeing the history of creation and paving the way toward abstract art. Ahmed employs this method as a resistance to the vices of the contemporary intellectual and artistic world.

This exhibition is the result of processes that seek to shape reflections on ideas in art. It is a unique opportunity to glimpse into the subjective universe of an artist who possesses a rare capacity for synthesis and abstraction, with a profound conceptual background. Without fanfare and with a rightly measured ego, Ahmed sips his American coffee each morning and embraces ordinary reality as an epic, everyday gesture.

Ahmed Gómez embodies the words with which Fernando Pessoa begins his famous poem "The Tobacco Shop":
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I am nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.‍