Draft:Josu Rekalde Izagirre

Josu Rekalde Izagirre (Amorebieta, Spain, 1959) is a Basque artist who creates multidisciplinary artworks in which he combines the experimental video and the sculptural installation with new technologies. The topics he covers are related to the individual and the collective consciousness. His work began in the 1980s and has taken on an international dimension, with exhibitions in Spain and abroad. Until 2020, he combined the artistic creation with his teaching as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

Biography
Josu Rekalde Izagirre was born in Amorebieta (Biscay, Spain) in 1959. He studied Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) where he later worked as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, as a lecturer in the speciality of art and new technologies.

His beginnings in art and video date back to the 1980s when he became interested, among others, in the work of the video artists Nam June Paik and Bill Viola and in the work of performers such as Esther Ferrer and her artistic contribution to the field of experimental video (performance and video-performance), especially in relation to personal identity and collective consciousness. In this initial context, the Donostia-San Sebastián video festival (1980-83) had relevance, with the participation of Antoni Muntadas, Eugeni Bonet, N.J. Paick, B. Viola Robert Wilson and where Steina and Woody Vasulka (founders of The Kitchen in 1971) imparted a workshop on creation with the electronic image.

He later took part in the Bideoaldia in Tolosa and made contact with artists of his generation, starting an associative activity that led him to become one of the founders of MEDIAZ (Association of Visual Artists of the Basque Country).

During these years his artistic creations have been exhibited throughout Spain and internationally (France, Italy, Peru, USA), combining this activity with his participation in congresses and festivals as a video-artist with electroacoustic activities and as a lecturer specialised in the combination of art and new technologies.

Trayectory
Rekalde's video creations are a space to experiment and establish relationships with art, science and technology. He flees from the imitation that reproduces a model in classical canons of beauty and proportion and creates new experiences where the perception of the senses generates new meanings in the individual (physical and psycho-emotional). Rekalde makes use of technologies to create new models of understanding the world, where he sometimes questions the sight as the main channel through which these representations reach us.

His field of work is multidisciplinary, although his best known facet is related to video and new technologies. The themes he works on range from intimacy to social relations, from the self to the other, from the metalinguistic to the narrative. He has exhibited and disseminated his work in numerous places, including the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (1995) and Girona (1997), Espace des Arts in Toulouse (1998), Mappin Gallery (Sheffield, UK, 1998), Espace d'Art Contemporani de Castelló (2000), La Panera Centre (Lleida, 2004), Goethe Institut (Rome, 2004) and Espacio Menos Uno (Madrid, 2006), Na Solyanke Gallery in Moscow as part of the exhibition: Jokes and Nightmares, Spanish video art from Dalí to the present day (2011), at the Centro Puertas de Castilla "Miradas al Videoarte" (2012), "ARTISTS AS CATALYSTS" by Ars Electronica at the La Alohondiga centre in Bilbao (2013), Festival Proyector, Madrid (2016), Museo de Arte e historia de Durango (2018), MediaLab Madrid (2018), La Ciudadela de Iruña-Pamplona (2019), ARTEKOM, Arte-Ekologia in Balmaseda, Bilbao and Donostia (2021).

Influences
Following the precursors of video-art, his work is presented in different formats, ranging from projections to multimedia art installations, introducing everyday elements of reality and sounds that interact with the spectator, who ceases to be a mere observer and becomes an active participant in the work. In line with his predecessors, Rekalde's video installations also contain elements with which he constructs new meanings, creating creative spaces of experiences. In his works, the artist uses visual, sensory, auditory and light elements, textures, virtual reality, symbols and metaphors to provoke psycho-emotional reactions in the spectator and/or participant.

Creative vision
Rekalde developed a holistic vision between technical and human sciences, avoiding dichotomy, integrating old and new forms of expression. The author reflected on this approach, arguing the following:"'Video creation is no longer an art related to new technologies, insofar as they are an everyday reality. It is an artistic attitude, which reflects this media hybrid that is video, the ability to capture reflections, questions and contradictions to our own culture. Riding between image and sound, between music and visual rhythm, video creation is like a social mirror, it makes television and the culture that sustains it to be recognised as the advertising monster that it is ( ...) ... artists need to touch real objects, relate them to our own bodies and propose a representation, not as a substitute for reality, but as organic matter transformed by the process of reflecting-creation.'"The evolution of Rekalde's work went from his early works of symbolic constructions with images of objects or body parts that suggested new meanings of thought and reflection in the viewer, to the latest works that are more focused on social issues. He invites the spectator to enter into this collective consciousness with a multidisciplinary proposal of committed video-art that awakens the spectator's social conscience, in line with the approaches and works of the video artists Antoni Muntadas and Francesc Torres. In relation to this evolution, the author has proposed a revision of postulates created by video-artists and to get rid of them in order to generate a new artistic space that makes new trends and creations possible.