print May 1987

Anton Lamazares

A distinct characteristic of Spanish art is its heterogeneous nature, making it difficult to tie down to one specific cultural discourse. In recent years, the vitality of some well-defined nuclei amid this multiple ferment has become evident, and Anton Lamazares, native of that hyperbolic, mysterious land of Galicia, is an outstanding example of the poetic richness that has burst out among Galician artists. Born in 1954, Lamazares creates work that is synthesizing and reductive, cruel and tender at the same time, and free of all erudite camouflage.

The works shown here, which are large in scale,

print April 1986

Julio González

Local authorities in Valencia recently purchased for this collection a splendid group of Julio González’s sculptures and drawings, which otherwise would never have been seen here. Such a commitment of funds to acquire the work of a Spanish artist is uncommon in Spain, at both the institutional and the private levels, as is the eagerness it indicates to develop important collections of recent art. These facts attest to the vitality of Valencian attitudes toward the arts, and also reflect the cultural autonomy characteristic of the region. Since the ’50s the work of artists and critics from Valencia

print March 1986

Menchu Lamas

Few people are aware of the cultural diversity of modern Spain; fewer still are aware of the implications of this diversity for contemporary Spanish art. Political and societal expatiation in Spain in the past decade has lessened fear of Northern European and, more generally, Western influences; the young especially feel free of the frequently devastating effects of acculturation. Not only have some avant-garde artists of the ’70s switched to new approaches more in accordance with the times, but a new generation of artists born in the ’50s has suddenly jumped to the forefront of the Spanish art

print February 1986

Carlos Pazos

Many artists do not make any deliberative attempt to control the outcome of their creative processes, finding content only after a work’s completion; choice has little room in their approach. Other artists demonstrate a more reflective attitude toward making art; decision and selection are taken as challenges, and given that they consider a lack of conscious intervention “not-action”, they only make known what they believe to be worthwhile.

Carlos Pazos, a 37-year-old artist who began working in the early ’70s, certainly falls within this second group. Pazos’ work occasionally seems reflexive

print January 1986

Antoni Llena

To have a show devoted to Antoni Llena (b. 1942) at a prestigious Barcelona gallery is significant for a number of reasons. Since the early ’60s Llena has been a very peculiar representative of contemporary Catalan art, in the sense that he has remained in the vanguard but always detached from its noisy celebrations. The quality of his work, not always mentioned or recognized, has been consistently high, even more when more mimetical styles have been dominant. In the early ’60s, only a few years after the violent explosion of Catalan informalism, a new movement began in Barcelona. Progressive

print October 1985

Toma Carr

Since the late ’70s Tom Carr’s work has included ideas of time—of both perception and execution—and of space, as both support and plastic instrument. These elements, together with color and image, have been mixed by Carr in a direct, personal, and poetic manner which has left him free to express his artistic sentiment in quite different ways and in different genres. Although some works may look like isolated novelties, the drawings, installations, sculptures, and objects all belong to the same family This unity is not always easy to detect, however, because the intention of the artist is

print September 1985

Rafael Canogar

During Rafael Canogar’s big 1982 retrospective in Madrid, many visitors were surprised by the diversity of the artist’s whole production. The sequence of creative changes paralleled the personal conflicts suffered, the decisions made, as well as the tiring effect of a long career practiced with enthusiasm. This recent exhibition again showed some changes worth consideration.

Canogar reached artistic maturity early as a member of the Spanish abstraction movement of the ’50s. The group reacted to formal abstraction by enlarging their subjective scope. Canogar painted violent, convulsed, and

print Summer 1985

Antonio Saura

Both the paintings and the personality of Antonio Saura have been described as paradigms of the Spanish character, even though his work is neither autobiographical nor specifically nationalistic. Saura defined his universe of black and white images as early as the ’50s, when he was part of the Spanish equivalent of the informel movement. Many critics in the mid ’60s, when Saura was already being shown internationally, saw his work as a sort of bridge between tradition and innovation. His brother Carlos, the well-known film director, once remarked that Saura had refuted the idea that “painting

print May 1985

Adolf Genovart

Adolf Genovart is one of the more independent of the young generation of Spanish painters, and seems to have avoided the burns that can easily hurt the young artist who touches the flames of the "latest thing.” He puts a protective distance between himself and the heat of fashion. Yet Genovart’s exhibitions since his first one-man show, in 1980, display both consistency and contemporaneity.

Genovart’s first studies were in philosophy, and only later did he move to the plastic arts. The Surrealist poets, Samuel Beckett, and especially TS. Eliot assisted in the switch to painting; Eliot woke

print March 1985

Alberti Ràfols-Casamada

After a successful show in Paris and shortly before a long-awaited retrospective at the Fundación Miró in Barcelona, Alberti Ràfols-Casamada exhibited a selection of his recent work here. Ones first impression of the show was of continuity and richness—the former to be understood not as repetitiveness but as an absence of hesitation, the latter in the sense that Ràfols-Casamada’s spirit is clearly very much alive despite the fact that his work is already an obligatory reference in any discussion of contemporary Spanish and Catalan art. He has established and maintained an unmistakable artistic

print February 1985

Jose Manuel Broto

José Manuel Broto came to the attention of Spanish art critics in 1976, when he took part in a group show with three other artists at this gallery. The show had a clear coherence, and made a firm statement in favor of the activity of painting. The inheritance of “postpainterly abstraction” and Abstract Expressionism, filtered through the intellectual bias of the French "support-surface” movement, was evident, and Broto and his colleagues were in fact quite firmly opposed to conceptual work, which was then still dominant in Spanish art.

Between the mid ’70s and the decades end the political and

Gloria Moure