Ferrán García Sevilla
18 Jan - 01 Mar 2008
FERRÁN GARCÍA SEVILLA
Fúcares Gallery’s exhibition of works by Ferrán García Sevilla is the first held in Madrid since 1995. It has been the artist’s choice not to turn it into a “as we said yesterday”, forcing him to review the part of his work unknown to Madrid’s public, and he has preferred to show pieces corresponding to two different series dated between 2005 and 2006, Bol [Bowl] and Rusc [Honeycomb].
Kevin Power has asserted many times that Ferrán García Sevilla was the painter who, in the early 80s, “changed the syntax of Spanish painting”, and did it through a dialogical attitude as to reality. “He doesn’t impose a language on us, but he talks to us in it”, he wrote.
In the mid 90s, if not a radical change, there was a very important transformation in his work. Some first inklings can be seen in several pieces of the Fecha [Date] series: thus Fecha 26, 31 and 36 (1992), and Fecha 168, 170 and 173 (1994).
Figuration came to be substituted by an abstract painting composition. And more importantly, its narrative, so far luxuriant, copious, readable from very different syntactic elaborations, came to constitute itself from much more limited sources, perhaps for it more rigorous.
Many of the works from Xa (1995) are exclusively made up of simple lines or geometries, when not random cascades of paint that turn rhythm and modulation into image. In these pictures everything moves, falls, slips, interprets a dance. “Each gesture, an impossible thing. An energy focus. High-flying hunt”.
It is also then, but above all in Tiro, Rupa, Targa (1996), when the surface is formed through superposing individualised and contrasted layers whose medium is the rhythm of appearance and whose image is the tone tempo. A phenomenon reaching its climax in Boca [Mouth] (2000) and Limbo (2001).
Since then, just as we had recorded his building a singular vocabulary in his 80s and early 90s works, he has now developed another glossary, this time perhaps more difficult to access, for its terms are abstract and its bonds established based on economy, on the reiterative simplicity of shapes, the cadence of their appearance, their ways of occupying the surface -always saturated, but either through big dark masses invading the canvas or through more graceful formulae that seem to float or airily scatter through it- and deliberately repeating motifs.
A common denominator in his latest works, whether the colour is transparent or opaque, is this idea about shapes or just points of colour wandering and radiating through empty spaces. Constant or at least repetitive are allusions to or the perception that we are contemplating a stellar space, a sky filling its spaces with paint and fixing its astronomical bodies through resources from painting. Unavoidably, Joan Miró’s skies or his big deserted canvases come to my mind, both from the 20s and subsequently, from the 60s and 70s. As those by Dalí in the 30s, too.
Mariano Navarro. An extract from El asesino perfecto (The Perfect Killer), January 2008.
Fúcares Gallery’s exhibition of works by Ferrán García Sevilla is the first held in Madrid since 1995. It has been the artist’s choice not to turn it into a “as we said yesterday”, forcing him to review the part of his work unknown to Madrid’s public, and he has preferred to show pieces corresponding to two different series dated between 2005 and 2006, Bol [Bowl] and Rusc [Honeycomb].
Kevin Power has asserted many times that Ferrán García Sevilla was the painter who, in the early 80s, “changed the syntax of Spanish painting”, and did it through a dialogical attitude as to reality. “He doesn’t impose a language on us, but he talks to us in it”, he wrote.
In the mid 90s, if not a radical change, there was a very important transformation in his work. Some first inklings can be seen in several pieces of the Fecha [Date] series: thus Fecha 26, 31 and 36 (1992), and Fecha 168, 170 and 173 (1994).
Figuration came to be substituted by an abstract painting composition. And more importantly, its narrative, so far luxuriant, copious, readable from very different syntactic elaborations, came to constitute itself from much more limited sources, perhaps for it more rigorous.
Many of the works from Xa (1995) are exclusively made up of simple lines or geometries, when not random cascades of paint that turn rhythm and modulation into image. In these pictures everything moves, falls, slips, interprets a dance. “Each gesture, an impossible thing. An energy focus. High-flying hunt”.
It is also then, but above all in Tiro, Rupa, Targa (1996), when the surface is formed through superposing individualised and contrasted layers whose medium is the rhythm of appearance and whose image is the tone tempo. A phenomenon reaching its climax in Boca [Mouth] (2000) and Limbo (2001).
Since then, just as we had recorded his building a singular vocabulary in his 80s and early 90s works, he has now developed another glossary, this time perhaps more difficult to access, for its terms are abstract and its bonds established based on economy, on the reiterative simplicity of shapes, the cadence of their appearance, their ways of occupying the surface -always saturated, but either through big dark masses invading the canvas or through more graceful formulae that seem to float or airily scatter through it- and deliberately repeating motifs.
A common denominator in his latest works, whether the colour is transparent or opaque, is this idea about shapes or just points of colour wandering and radiating through empty spaces. Constant or at least repetitive are allusions to or the perception that we are contemplating a stellar space, a sky filling its spaces with paint and fixing its astronomical bodies through resources from painting. Unavoidably, Joan Miró’s skies or his big deserted canvases come to my mind, both from the 20s and subsequently, from the 60s and 70s. As those by Dalí in the 30s, too.
Mariano Navarro. An extract from El asesino perfecto (The Perfect Killer), January 2008.