COLOR IS LIGHT. Esteban Vicente 1999-2000

The title of the exhibition, Color is Light, has its origin in a phrase by the painter, himself: “The quality of color is light.” Color and light, ultimately, constitute the central themes of his work. He carried this idea of purity or purification to such an extreme that, throughout his entire life, it became his vocation as an artist who devoted all his energy to understanding the physical world through the language of painting. As a painter, he was a sworn enemy of narrative and description, attentive only to the intimate nature of reality, which he strove to represent as experience, not as knowledge. For this reason, it is especially exciting to observe how, in some of these late works, there appear the outlines of trees or stones, after having disappeared from his work as if dissolved in color, fifty years ago. Perhaps, after a long life, it is true that we look around us again with the same eyes as when we began. In regard to his drawings, those done during this last year sometimes take on the quality of a murmur, a murmur of a line. The line is faint, but steady. It is as if the pencil held the hand, rather than the reverse. There is a fading away; everything is much clearer now. Matter seems obliterated by the white light that flashes from the canvas. And color hardly splashes the surface of the scene as it delves into its depths. The entire corpus of his drawings has a Morandi-like concision and perseverance, an insistance that, in the end, is very revealing. Vicente wrote of the works of Zurbarán, one of his favorite painters: “I see in his work qualities that, for me, represent the mystical: stillness, repose, inner silence, passion, energy.” These words, to a certain extent, are also applicable to his own works. In this context it is inevitable to recall what Robert Rosenblum has said about painting the sacred, not the religious, in reference to Abstract Expressionism in America, in his book, Modern Painting and the Tradition of Northern Romanticism. In viewing Esteban Vicente´s most recent works, we do not find any symptoms of old age. On the contrary, the bold coloring and astonishing luminosity have a energy that is usually associated with youth. But they also have a serenity and wisdom acquired after an entire lifetime devoted to dealing with form and color. Upon analysis, there appear all those elements proper to his personal language: a chromatism that finds its guiding principle of harmony in contrast; a perfectly structured organization of masses of color, whose importance has always been evident in his drawings. Lastly, we find that spacial, atmospheric quality that is in perfect agreement with the fact that these are inner landscapes, as the painter himself has said so often. Finally, we should mention what is perhaps the key to his idea of creative work. Esteban Vicente, himself, had said on more than one occasion: “I paint to know what painting is.” This, then, is the inquisitive, open and forthright–but never self-satisfying-atttitude that has tinted with such youthful energy the paintings of a man who is almost one-hundred years old