Fernando Renes is the only Spanish artist in Vitamin D, Phaidon’s new book on drawing (unless one also counts Ernesto Caivano, who was born in Spain but grew up in Argentina and the United States). Though not widely known before the publication of this book, Renes’s drawings, in which he lays out what might be called visual aphorisms, are often quite powerful. His drawings seem to relate to little stories that are suggested but never fully developed. In these stories, he balances opposing elements: personal concerns and public ones, images of reality and spaces of the imagination, and so on. As