ATMÓSFERAS

Abstraction and Tradition

One of the things we should have learned by this stage of history is that it is not possible to do anything truly significant—not only in the realm of art, but in culture as a whole—without fully acknowledging the awareness of the imminent danger involved in such endeavours: one either works resolutely from the experience of a limit, from a dimension that at every moment acquires increasingly agonising traits, or one ends up falling under the spell of an omnipotence that becomes more and more childish and illusory with each passing day.

In fact, the artistic culture we know has been handed down to us by a subject that today should be considered as having disappeared. This subject was the one that, until not so long ago, constituted the point of reference for what we called “spirit”, that is, a differentiated, free sphere, supposedly safe from immediate material needs. This now disintegrated subject was, in essence, the only one that gave meaning to culture, both affirmative and adversarial, both traditional and avant-garde. It was, more or less, a kind of well-intentioned idealisation of the bourgeois subject: a somewhat imaginary, occasional figure with no future, who today seems to have betrayed his overly faithful travelling companions.

However, this circumstance can only have important consequences in the world of art. For what it implies is that the history of the future has been left without a subject, without the main protagonist of that old heroic struggle of modernity in pursuit of the new, that much-sought treasure which today has ended up entirely in the hands of planetary-scale technology. This means, among other things, that it is no longer artists who are responsible for providing decisive innovations. Whether they know it or not, far from constituting any kind of “avant-garde” of anything in particular, they all form part of a large rearguard still awaiting articulation. The truth is that, when taken seriously, art can no longer be made without looking back. Or, put differently: it only acquires genuine meaning insofar as it consciously refers to some form of tradition. And this is so to the point that contemporary art seems destined to become, fundamentally, an interpretation of past art, both the most remote and the most recent.

This does not mean at all that there is no room left for originality. On the contrary: it should be obvious that the inscription of art within a tradition more than ever requires originality. And not the merely subjective, too-easy kind that assumes it starts from zero, but the authentic kind, which is much more difficult: that which cuts itself out, without complexes, from what is already known, that which reinterprets accumulated experience—perhaps worn and faded, or even virtually exhausted—restoring its relevance and renewing its meaning.

It is probably this effort that a careful gaze can recognise in the already long trajectory of Manolo Rey Fueyo. In fact, his painting has always developed within the framework of abstraction. During the 1980s he still combined more or less expressionist elements with scattered references to that heavy, harsh, implacable industrial reality he knew well from the surroundings of La Felguera in Asturias, where he comes from. And it is curious that these references, which introduced geometrising configurations into his paintings, were due precisely to an emotional motivation, a kind of Asturian nostalgia for someone who, by the unpredictable course of events, ended up settling in Valencia. And vice versa: it was the more “gestural” traits that most likely derived from a conscious and considered insertion into the tradition of early American abstract painting and European Informalism.

Rey Fueyo’s work currently unfolds within this same tradition, although along somewhat more sober and consistent paths. He still maintains his tendency towards monochromy, which even seems to have intensified. But this austerity appears to have acquired a different meaning. To understand it properly, it should be related to his emphasis on series. In fact, his recent paintings as a whole present themselves as variations on a flexible but immediately recognisable structure: a play of large vertical and horizontal strokes of particularly fluid, light paint, in a progression in which the artist also insists on a permanent dialogue with chance. The result is a kind of loose but not arbitrary weave, within whose interstices the necessary depth is generated so that, as the fortunate outcome of an intentio obliqua, an unexpected luminosity comes to meet us.

Vicente Jarque