1999
(…) The problem of the stylistic classification of Xavier Grau’s painting is not a personal problem of his own, but rather, one could say, of all contemporary abstract painters. In the post-historical period, as described by Arthur C. Danto or David Carrier, these painters do not find a place of their own within any of the major overarching narratives, but neither do the rest of contemporary artists, whether they paint or not. Stylistic classifications serve historians in order to create supposedly objective canons that allow works of art to be judged.
In the present day, this is far less clear, which demands a greater degree of commitment from the viewer. Grau’s paintings illustrate this situation very clearly. In them, a precarious and almost arbitrary order is established over an ironic chaos of movement and colour, achieving surfaces of great beauty. These, however, are not imposed upon us, but rather offered as part of an impassioned dialogue.
Grau’s extraordinary recent paintings explain better than ever the complexity and originality of his discourse. Certainly, if his work needs to be contextualised, it is in fact related to other postmodern practices developed from the late seventies on both sides of the Atlantic, which precisely question the academic inheritances of the two aforementioned movements. It is true that, formally, Grau’s work—particularly erudite—is in dialogue with that of some major names of Modernity—from Cézanne and Picasso to Philip Guston and Frank Stella—but conceptually it is much closer to the pataphysical, questioning and mocking discourse of the German Sigmar Polke, for example, and of some of his followers, such as the American David Salle. Grau, in any case, is a singular artist in his avoidance of all narcissistic self-aggrandisement, and this makes his aesthetic discourse—his style—articulate itself in a particularly hermetic and fragmentary manner.
Referring to Sigmar Polke, Donald Kuspit explains how he creates in his paintings a pictorial situation that entails extreme errors, where everything evokes something but without evoking anything in particular. For Kuspit—whose overestimated and less profound-than-they-appear critiques share something with the work of the German painter—the work of Polke is an example of how, in contemporary art—and as articulated by Theodor W. Adorno in his aesthetic theory—the lack of meaning is a deliberate interaction, or how, likewise, non-intelligibility is a possibility of expression voluntarily chosen by artists in order to reflect on the enigmatic qualities of art.
Grau’s work is related to all this, but not only from a provocative sarcasm. Xavier Grau builds his painting upon a perfectly identifiable personal style, one that has evolved slowly and has always been characterised, as suggested earlier, by the pursuit and attainment of beauty. This has undoubtedly made him appear more conventional than he truly is, leading viewers of his work to focus on it and forget the issues we are discussing—issues that are not only equally interesting but necessary for a proper interpretation of his work.
Grau’s paintings appear modern—in the English sense of Modern—in that they present themselves as autonomous works. Formally, they are heirs to Cézanne as a precursor of abstraction, to Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism. In short, to the entire evolutionary line of Modernity that culminates in painting made solely of colour, light, and brushstrokes on a flat surface intended to be non-illusionistic. But these same paintings are also heirs to the late Picasso, Surrealism, Pop Art, and the late Philip Guston—ultimately an enemy of ideas of purity and one of the high priests of pluralism—subtly presenting characters, or parts of them, from popular iconography, and also seeking to provoke the viewer’s unconscious through evocative forms.
We consider this worth noting because in Grau’s paintings there have sometimes appeared caricatured fragments of human bodies that reveal a satirical vein entirely uncommon in formalist—or theoretical—tendencies in art.
As mentioned before, the series of paintings titled Humboldt—in honour of a giant squid which, without being exactly giant, does not fit into any frying pan—perfectly illustrates the usual characteristics of Grau’s style. In them, painting and drawing are articulated without hierarchical order, geometries of amorphous masses are set in opposition, light is chaotic and there is no shading, and the final result, reached through controlled improvisation, is strongly reminiscent of a jazz piece. Grau’s paintings from the last two years, in any case, have a much lighter appearance, or, if you will, their space is less crowded and more profound, achieving their best results, in my opinion, in larger formats. These paintings also seem faster in execution, although they remain tremendously complex. Not only is the space chaotic—while at the same time, let us not forget, masterfully composed—but it is impossible to establish the sequence of execution of the pictorial phenomena that make it up.
Xavier Grau’s painting does not pursue novelty as a criterion of quality beyond the novelty that may arise from the construction of a personal style in an age of cynical appropriations. His contradictory surfaces do not exploit non-intelligibility in a manner that is mannered or irritating, as in many followers of Polke, but instead feel profoundly genuine. His paintings can sometimes be impertinent, given their acidic and dissonant humour, but they also seek the complicity of a cultured and sophisticated viewer. They are never the result of a capricious tantrum or a merely half-hearted joke, but rather constitute a beautiful and striking continuation of a certain European tradition of intelligence, as I have suggested on other occasions, which begins with the classical Greco-Roman philosophers, passes through Montaigne and Quevedo, and arrives, tinted with black humour, at the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry and his many disciples—more accurately, accomplices—of the present day.
Enrique Juncosa
(De “Deconstruyendo a Mickey Mouse”, 1997)
