STATEMENT
Although some art theorists thought that abstract expressionism, pop art and especially conceptual art were the ends of painting in ART, this did not happen and will never happen, and ART continued to paint in the 80s, 90s and to the present day.
I start my artistic proposal with the supposed death of painting in the art of expressionism by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, etc. It has been said that painting entered a blind alley, but that, in reality, it was the birth of a new pictorial art that reaches our days.
The painting did not die with the advent of conceptual art. Instead, it incorporated this artistic trend that wanted to kill it, giving birth to conceptual pictorial art, which reinvents painting and is the heir to conceptual art and the entire history of universal art.
Abstraction and figuration today are no longer opposed but rather coexist harmoniously in the same work, picking up in this way the torch that Willem de Kooning left behind with his abstract figuration. In addition, it adds a charge inherited from conceptual art that the expressionism of the 50s of the last century did not have.
Today, the objective is not to make a revolution of the forms as it was done in the 20th century at the time of the avant-garde since this ended with the appearance of conceptual art from the 60s to the end of the 20th century.
In the 21st century, the objective is to make a painting that inherits all the techniques and forms of the 20th century and earlier but with a different conceptual perspective.
The new thing to do in a painting is not so much the forms as the concept.
Currently, it is not possible to make a painting with new forms, and it is not even intended because, in that sense, all the painting made in the 20th century has already investigated and experienced everything.
Therefore, my proposal is not linked to making a novelty in the form, a currently practically impossible mission, but rather to make the novelty in the concept.
I make a painting with commitment and a conceptual intention that does not pretend to be politically correct
My painting does not pretend to be only aesthetic or abstract. My work is expressionist and conceptual at the same time, expressing and denouncing concepts that limit the human being and restrict his freedom and free movement around the world. My work supports just causes, even if they are often lost beforehand. My work is a denunciation of social injustices. I am not in favour of any current political ideology in particular. I am against all religious or political fanaticism. I’m afraid I have to disagree with competition and the savage struggle between nations for power and geopolitical control. I believe in cooperation, not confrontation.
One of the main objectives of my work is to provoke in the viewer a critical reflection on society (reason) and an emotional reaction (instinct).
Reason (intellect, concept) and instinct (emotions) must be balanced, freeing instinct from repression and showing the intellect’s strength.
The goal of art is not to solve the problems of this world but to ask questions and offer new perspectives.
It is about establishing a balance between expressionism and the conceptual, between instinct and rationality.
My work is not about making illustrations, a traditional painting, or a realistic, naturalistic or hyper-realistic painting because photography achieves this much better.
I intend with my work to make pictorial conceptual art, using all the baggage and heritage of the history of universal painting and making art of our time but with current and past techniques, both digital and analogue.
Art with a concept, meaning, message, discourse, objectives and intentionality, summarizing: with something to say, that is, as a form of expression of my ideas and my way of seeing the world; How could it be otherwise, since neutral and objective art does not exist, because as Ramón de Campoamor said: «nothing is true or false, because, in this treacherous world, everything depends on the color of the glass through which it is viewed».
The figurative will be outlined, avoiding mimicry and trying to capture from reality both the subjective and uncontrolled that arises in the act of painting, as well as the rational and calculated that is intended to be done.
Liberating, relaxing and fun pictorial techniques will be used, inherited from «action painting» since it is intended to achieve happiness and well-being in the act of painting.
Gesturalism will be given free rein by applying the painting with force in the different techniques.
The symbols will be represented in an inconspicuous way and with various readings.
«The aim of painting it’s not decorating apartments; it’s an offensive and defensive weapon. An artist is simultaneously a political being constantly alert to the events that occur in the world, whether they are terrifying or pleasant.» Pablo Picasso.
Art leaves me cold, without criticism, without social and vital questions; attractive, self-absorbed art does not attract me.
The painting is not that it can have a political interpretation, but instead that it has an inherent political charge in the cases in which it alludes to some social issue, as it could not be otherwise, since everything social is political. And in addition, it should be noted that there is no apolitical art, nor is it above the political. Everything has a political sign; nothing is neutral. Therefore, committed art is not avoided here either; on the contrary, it participates in it, and an attitude is intended to be denunciatory, in the best style of conceptual art.
You have to create strangeness so that the viewer wonders forever.
Art does not always have a meaning; it is enough to suggest several readings and is disturbing.
It is about manipulating and rearranging reality by defunctionalising it and making poetry with it.
Contextualise our environment by looking for its natural, authentic legal order and adapting it to our needs, restructuring reality without trying to find hidden philosophical or artistic essences.
I agree with Jean Dubuffet that “art is addressed to the spirit (or mind) and not to the eyes (optical art) as primitive societies contemplate it» and that it is a more natural language than words and that more than more prosperous, it’s different.”
THE CURRENT
What is current is neither representation nor avant-garde experimentalism.
It is about seeking a balance past the excesses of representativeness, experimentalism and the conceptual.
My proposal goes through the path of balance without excesses by overcoming prejudices towards the representation of abstract experimentalism and pure and straightforward conceptual art.
Therefore, it would be a question of making a form that transmits a “message”, and that becomes one with it, that says what it counts for and what it is.
LARGE MEGALOPOLISES
To denounce that the concentration outside of all human measures, of man in the great megalopolises, is one of the most disastrous consequences of this mega-industrialized society that is on the way to self-destruction by leaps and bounds.
COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF IN COMMUNICATIONS
The modern artist faces an increasingly technical and artificial environment, in which nature is becoming more and more reserves or a national park, and man is more of an anonymous citizen, alienated, lonely and lost in the big cities; despite the current media, we are in the era of the most potent artificial communication and the most accentuated human isolation, because this is what interests the power and what, of course, power, that there are no places that favour the meeting, that people do not go out into the street, talk to each other as little as possible and carry out even fewer initiatives. Against all this nonsense, the artist has to fight with his weapons like any other citizen; his guns are plastic, all without exception. The prejudices and nonsense about Renaissance, medieval or prehistoric art are over; all forms and artistic trends of all time are valid to fight against this cancer of the power of the monsters of our time: multinationals, politicians, bankers, pharmaceutical companies, various great industries, and great fortunes, these are the great catastrophes of our era.
REPRESENTATIVE ART
Representational, committed combative, realistic, abstract and figurative art at the same time, art with life, artistic representation of life, and representation of what is wanted and what is not wanted or desired, cathartic and sublimating picture of life.
I am drawing as an abstraction of reality, as an artistic expression as a selection of truth, as a desire for existence and sublimation of it, pointing the finger of drawing at the sores of human wounds, caricaturing, exaggerating, showing and representing the best and the worst that the human being carries inside.
CONCEPTUAL FUNDAMENTALISM
And suppose the post-Marxist critique sees in the operations of deaesthetization a triumph over the market, necessary at a given historical moment. In that case, we believe this historical moment of conceptual fundamentalism has already passed, and the identification between capitalism and aesthetics. However, until now, it would not have to continue being so because any artistic proposal within the framework of capitalism will ultimately be swallowed up by it, no matter how conceptual and anti-system it may be. Only with the end of capitalism could there be an art that is not absorbed by it.
It doesn’t seem to me crazy or apocalyptic at this point to predict where the current human «development» and its unsustainability are headed.
And I am with Braudillard, Foucault and Habermas in that they deceive us with an aestheticisation of society with which they pretend to subjugate humanity by showing us a pretty bark and a pretty simulacrum with which to feel satisfied.
«THE STYLE»
The personal style is another separate issue, apparently abandoned by the conceptual; in Warhol’s pop art realisation, the absence of traces in the minimal or the use of found objects has not made it disappear from the scene but instead changed the concept of style, although being present, in the original ways of carrying out the new works, which in the end imprint a seal of the house or the artist’s mark for a particular way of acting now instead of being limited to specific forms as it happened before.
With the limitation to specific forms, I refer to the bad habit of copying oneself over and over again because «this is what sells best», leaving the artist’s creativity low and demonstrating that the artist only has one thing to say, a single work that he repeats over and over again. Big mistake, because everything that is repeated ad nauseam self-destructs or at least bores.
And it is one thing to recognize the artist’s hand and another to self-copy and always repeat the same thing.
ARTISTIC GENIUS AND THE SUBLIME
I am not interested in the philosophical perceptions of the beautiful, the sublime, serene contemplation and other Kantian reflections, nor am I interested in the representation of the invisible, nor am I interested in the myth of genius as that talent of imagination, understanding, spirit and taste.
Nor will I pretend to express the «objective truth» because I already know that it does not exist and everything is covered in subjectivity.
ART AND SCIENCE
The link between art and science seems to me to be a double-edged sword, taking into account the severe shortcomings of current science, its theoretical tendencies and proposals, and its total dependence on economic power. His objectivity and, even more so, his independence seem highly questionable to us, as are his suggestions on many occasions based on scientific prejudices and myths, unquestionable as a new current creed.
I agree with Nietzsche that art is the human activity that elevates the individual the most because it is the most creative. However, we do not pursue absolute truths since these are illusions that have been forgotten.
Well, rationality is deficient since it subsumes everything under universal concepts and excludes the particular, the special, the sensible and the emotional, and this critique of rationality already begins in Romanticism but is still valid and more than ever after all the manipulations to which science and power have subjected us.
If science-power is an inseparable tandem in these times.