Last week, a most interesting exhibition of Jose Maria Yturralde’s drawings and paintings opened at the Juan March Foundation in Palma de Mallorca, accompanied by a talk by the artist, dialoguing with Manuel Fontán del Junco, director of museums and exhibitions at the Fundación Juan March.  It proved a wonderful discussion, touching on many issues that were both very human and very inspiring to any artist.

Yturralde, a tall, gentle-faced man with marvellously intelligent hands, was born in Cuenca in 1942.  Very soon, he began to be fascinated by space, light and volumes as he explored a castle near his home in Olite, the beginnings of his passion for drawing and for exploring the meaning and dimensions of space.  As life went on, he evolved towards serious artistic studies, initially in Zaragoza and then Valencia in the Escuela de Bellas Artes, where his professors were trained in the classical 18th century approach, requiring many hours of drawing from the sculpture models in their collection, another facet of his fascination with space and volumes.

Rebelling against this classical approach, Yturralde took himself off to Paris in 1959, where Kandinsky, Nicolas de Staël, Rouault and so many others caused artistic ferment. Inevitably his Valencia professors were horrified at his new passions when he returned to Valencia, but they retained him as a student, clearly recognising his abilities. More frustrations impelled him to take himself off to Stuttgart, where Der Blaue Reiter group impressed him deeply and he began to meet people who would be influential in his artistic trajectory.

Back in Spain, he started to work as an artist and art teacher, establishing himself as a respected and diversely able creative member of the wider Spanish community. His first solo exhibition took place in 1965 in Valencia, with work that showed influences of “op” art and one of his most admired artists, Vasarely.  He was an ardent experimenter with different media, whilst forging friendships with many artists who would become household names in Spain and beyond.  His questing spirit led him, in 1968, to start investigating the use of early computers in the creation of plastic forms, funded by a grant from the newly created Centro de Calculo and Madrid University, lecturing on this innovative subject in Valencia, Barcelona, Pamplona and Bilbao. Still faithful to space, light and volumes…

Many successes, many meanders and endless pushing out of boundaries in his art practice eventually let him to MIT in Boston, where he was admitted as a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the end of 1973. There, space became ever more sophisticated as a subject of investigation, together with how art could be expanded and enriched by the new technologies of lasers, fibre optics and natural energy sources such as wind, solar energy or tidal power.  Amidst all this swirl of investigations and inspirations, Yturralde also developed his first tridimensional artworks that could fly, the world of comets and flying structures, in fact a linking-back to one of his earliest passions, building model planes. 

In the USA, between teaching at MIT, his investigations and creative work and his meetings with stimulating artists and thinkers, his art practice had deepened in authority and success.  His connections with MIT would continue for many years hence as he experimented in all new means of expression, from video to audio, while he endlessly investigated compositional structures, visible and invisible.  

Back in Europe, Yturralde has achieved great recognition over the years. But as I listened to this tall, slender artist recount incidents in his life with humour and humility, I was impressed by his quiet emphasis on the importance of judo and the deep influence of matters Japanese and Zen.  As an aside, he apparently started to learn judo in Madrid at an early age from a French judo master, none other than the artist, Yves Klein, who was head of the Spanish judo team in 1953!

What did I learn, as a fellow artist passionate about drawing – in my case, metalpoint drawing – from Yturralde’s talk?  Naturally, to follow one’s instincts, listen to one’s passions and interests, be endlessly curious and experimental… but also to trust that meditative stillness and quietude that accompanies creativity, to strive for simplicity and directness and never to forget how the natural world is the source of so much of one’s conscious or unconscious inspiration in art.