In his book Intuitive Intelligence, the American essayist Malcolm Gladwell reminds us that many of our opinions are formed after a very brief analysis, a quick glance, a blink of an eye, and yet they are as or more valid than others that take us weeks of reflection. The first time I saw a work by Joaquín Ureña I thought quickly, intuitively: this is an art of today, and it is a fresh art. Years have passed and I still feel the same way about his work. I will try to explain that intuition:

IT'S AN ART OF TODAY. Ureña has managed to give new life to a technique that seemed immovable. What he has done for watercolour it reminds us of what Andreas Gursky did for photography: inventing a new format for it. Just as before Gursky one thought that such large photographs could not exist (and in fact the German creator in his beginnings had to resort to a special machine to print his images at the sizes he wanted), before Ureña we did not imagine that such large watercolours could be painted. And like Gursky, Ureña has had to create his own working systems. There is a video from a few years ago that shows the artist in his studio, preparing the papers on which he works with the help of a series of gadgets, unfolding, gluing, fixing. Size matters. The formal novelty of Joaquín Ureña's watercolours lies in the fact that they are so large, so tall and so wide.

But thematically, they also offer novelties. In his most emblematic pieces, still lifes and interiors, Ureña paints a new world. And it is new because it has no history, on the contrary, everything seems newly installed. The tables made with planks on trestles, the flexos, the DM and conglomerate libraries, the adaptable metallic shelves, the plastic drawer units; all of them reflect a world different from the traditional interiors of bourgeois painting, in which the decoration revealed the accumulated weight of generations and where dark and heavy furniture triumphed. In Ureña we find the current world of light and clear furniture supermarkets, like Ikea and Leroy Merlin, which have democratized the interior design for Spanish society. The artist from Lleida has been the first plastic artist who has been able to capture this change of domestic image, which derives from such a prosaic phenomenon as the evolution of the furniture market, which has had relevant consequences in terms of our imaginary and the aesthetics of our society.

IT'S A FRESH ART. We observe Ureña's works. They are spacious, white abounds, they breathe and let us breathe. They tend to symmetry, with those well-structured and orderly distributed spaces of the windows or the aluminium doors. Not only that, but they do not overwhelm, they liberate. If we leave the studio, Ureña takes us to the terrace with plastic chairs, to the enclosed gardens of new housing developments, whether on the coast or in the suburbs of townhouses. The coolness of the evening on the terrace, the freshness of the freshly watered grass in the garden, the coolness of the shade on the open balcony, are gifts that the artist gives us to invite us to enjoy the moment.

I look at a watercolour by Joaquín Ureña, and I blink. I am in front of an airy and luminous space, with light furniture. In front of a large piece that is at the same time lightweight.

Sergio Vila-Sanjuán