The series Orden y Progreso (Order and Progress) by Nicolás Laiz Placeres is viewed by the artist as a continuation and leap in his progress. It is perhaps also a kind of penance, a castling, an unresolvable loop that leaves behind products of a calculated and somehow self-repressive action. A return to painting through disciplinary rigor.
Laiz Placeres has spent years consecrated to the task of ordering, first as an anthropological and archaeological Canarian museum, volumetric and sculptural, and now embarking on a kind of return to painting of works that at first seem to refer to the sculptural arrangements of Tony Cragg from the 80's. Those pieces by Cragg were placed on the floor or on the wall, without a frame or limit other than the architectural space of the museum, constituting a clear example of 'sculpture in the expanded field'. However, these new pieces by Laiz Placeres are more like 'expanded painting', works in which they consciously want to return to the limits of the painting, of the small painting.
Is this an oil painting? Perhaps, in reality all paint is, since what is used up to now to apply color to canvases has been derived from petroleum; but here, in addition to using the derivative of acrylic, which serves as an adhesive bed of support, the chromatic material is made up of small residual volumes of an ecocidal activity: remains of consumption, crushed plastic or even piche, that is the accidental residue- the fatal, forensic evidence of unintentional ecocides.
Undoubtedly, any creator imposes a discipline that he has to obey in order to do his job, a personal technique that sometimes resembles the deprivation of liberty; all discipline entails that. But in this case, submitting to a strict self-imposed norm seems to be not only the means, but also the end itself.
In the artist's own words: "These paintings begin with an action of selective collection of fragments of microplastic on the beach and end with an act of organization at the level of the painting. The repetition of one gesture after another in a loop is the end of all this."
