William Kentridge

La semana pasada tuve la oportunidad de ver la exposición de este autor gráfico, tiene una serie de trabajos con carboncillo, y pude ver unos videos muy interesantes, con un cierto carácter arquitectónico con fotogramas realizados a carboncillo. Es una estética un tanto apocalíptica, pero me pareció un soplo de aire fresco, respecto a lo que estamos acostumbrados (y que Joseph Beuys, me perdone), allí sentado en la pequeña galería de la escuela de bellas artes sentí un cierto alívio ante lo desconocido y me asombraba en soledad al descubrir nuevas imágenes y un nuevo ritmo.

No se si ya lo conocereis o no, en cualquier caso me pareció interesante, aquí os dejo algo de información que he encontrado, y un video de su obra.

William Kentridge is a South African artist. He was born in Johannesburg in 1955. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and then a diploma in Fine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation. At the beginning of the 1980s, he studied mime and theatre at the L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He had hoped to become an actor, however: "I was fortunate to discover at a theatre school that I was so bad an actor [... that] I was reduced to an artist, and I made my peace with it."^[1]. Between 1975 and 1991, he was acting and directing in Johannesburg's Junction Avenue Theatre Company. In the 1980s, he worked on television films and series as art director.

Kentridge is perhaps best known for his animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.^[2]