THE LIGHT OF LOOKING
October 7, 2002 – January, 12 2003
While modern art is usually identified with abstraction, it is also true that realism was one of the first movements of the avant-garde. Through it, subject matter that had previously been considered inappropriate or inferior was introduced into nineteenth-century painting. The result was a greater importance conceded to pictorial language, in which the merit of the painting itself went beyond the mere interest in the scene that was depicted. Throughout the twentieth century, the avant-garde nature of realism has been proved by its presence in movements such as Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Magical Realism, Surrealism and Hyper Realism.
In regard to the painters in this exhibition, their anticonventional intent to break with the art currently in vogue in Spain at the time is evident, considering the fact that they began their artistic career in the decade of the 1950s, when informalist abstraction was becoming the most important tendency in this country. From that initial moment and until today, as can be seen in the works in the exhibition, these artists were committed to painting the visual world around them. Even though, as Francisco Calvo Serraller, the curator of the exhibition, says in the catalogue, “The visibility of the present is charged with the memory of the past and joined together with an invisibility that illuminates the meaning and significance of things that are not mere things.” Both the purpose and the language often remind us of the great masters of Spanish painting of the past, such as Velázquez and Zurbarán. Other essential aspects of these works include the attempt to capture invisible presences, the inscription of time in painting, a preoccupation with the arrangement of forms in space and the depiction of a subject with a minimum amount of elements.
The paintings, sketches and sculpture included in this exhibition were selected to enable the viewer to compare how different artists have dealt with the same subject matter as well as discover the peculiarity of their individual way of seeing and the nuances within the realism which they all have in common. Even though they all coincide in their interest in depicting their immediate surroundings, they differ in many other aspects, and it is possible to discern traces of very diverse tendencies among them. Amalia Avia’s rich treatment of pictorial matter borders on Informalism, while the noticeable absence of figures in her urban scenes paradoxically serves to evoke their presence even more forcefully. The silence and essentiality of Carmen Laffón’s still-lifes and landscapes recall a kind of lyrical Minimalism also evident in her sculpture. Antonio López’s faithfulness to everyday reality permits him to update such traditional subjects as still-lifes or nudes and transform them into documents of their time. His sculptures reveal the influence of the serene and monumental nature of Greek, Egyptian and Mesopotamian statues, while those of Francisco López Hernandez, with their own individual personality, are closer to the Roman and Renaissance tradition of the bas-relief. The sculptures of Julio López Hernández take on a more literary aspect in their poetic search for the immaterial in three dimensions. In the still-lifes and gardens of María Moreno, the vegetal world acquires a a dignity that rescues it from triviality, as if she were painting portraits of flowers. In Esperanza Parada’s mysterious still-lifes of objects there is an echo of the School of Paris, and Pancho Cossío, in particular. Finally, Isabel Quintanilla’s interiors are reminiscent of a type of composition related to Neoplasticism or to the geometric ruled lines of Oskar Schlemmer