ESTEBAN VICENTE DRAWINGS 1920 – 2000 – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente

ESTEBAN VICENTE DRAWINGS 1920 – 2000

March 30 – November 14, 2010.

Among the observations of Esteban Vicente concerning the painter’s craft and on the creative process, there are several revealing the importance the artist gave, on the one hand, to the practice of drawing as an autonomous discipline, and on the other, to the line and the stroke as foundational elements of form, regardless of the medium being used. With this in mind, it might at first seem surprising that an artist whose favourite means of expression were light and colour should leave such a sizeable legacy of drawing, and should so often stress the need for the mastering of this technique.

His insistence on the need to cultivate this discipline was related to the fact that for Esteban Vicente drawing was the tool by which the artist explored reality before managing to capture it. Drawing, in his opinion was, indeed, the best means of researching the surrounding environment while at the same time improving one’s creative vision. Drawing would promote the fixing of forms and the revealing, in the sense of discovering, of all that could otherwise remain unperceived by the artist in that reality which made up his main source material – regardless of any reworking it might later undergo.

We are exhibiting drawings by Esteban Vicente over the eighty years of his career, many not before shown.

We follow a chronological order through the painter’s formative years in Spain and France, before his move to the United States in 1936. In the 1940s we find a period of restless exploration marked by recently discovered cubist work. Finally we find his fully matured work, related to the New York abstract expressionist school of the 1950s until our own time.

It is exciting for the viewer to enter into the creative artistic processes of the different periods. Particularly illuminating are his series of female nudes, continuing till the late sixties. So are those in which we find a process of cleansing and stripping down in the creation of his own shining world with organic or geometric forms floating in a serene atmosphere. These form landscapes in which forms and empty spaces sometimes have the same density, and where we find the pulsing of the different rhythms of the universe.