LA IMAGEN LÍQUIDA
Powerful Emblems
At a time when DIY has replaced any compositional approach and artistic risk tends to be neutralised in childish foot-stamping, the mythical proposal of Antón Patiño acquires a primarily epic tone. Patiño is one of the Spanish painters who has most lucidly reflected on his practice, establishing a lineage in which he has managed to push beyond the proposals of abstract expressionism and the canonisation of informalism, developing an intense materiality over which he unfolds pulsional drawings that tend towards the emblematic. After his reductive exhibition at the CGAC, Patiño found renewed energy that has led him to produce some of his best paintings.
Empty chairs, the outline of amphorae evoking poetic shipwreck and an archaeology of memory, cyclists engaged in a playful nomadism, share space with the trembling net—a distortion of the modern grid—which Patiño introduces as a trace of immediacy. The stains, especially the black ones alluding to oil spilled at sea, turn the pictorial space into a kind of vertiginous catastrophe in which any decorative complacency or the all-too-common lyrical sedimentation is avoided. In some of his magnificent writings, this painter has referred to Beckettian chaos as a form of truth aware that turbulence and fragmentation are features of modern perceptual experience. The notion of the rhizome, which Deleuze and Guattari placed at the threshold of their exploration of schizophrenia and the conspiracy of the unproductive, has been a constant source of inspiration for Patiño, who has preferred surrender to gesture over the mannerist preservation of accidents or fascination with the phenomenological neatness of minimalism.
In his recent works, this artist constantly alludes to clay and, of course, to water—that fluid world in which identity becomes dispersed. Patiño seeks a liquid image that is intrinsically germinal; he wants to flow, paradoxically, over a domain that is in some sense desert-like.
In view of Patiño’s large-scale recent works, we can see that he is at the height of his expressive resources. Paintings such as As sinais-raíz or Gran labirinto de Gundivós are forceful examples of the pictorial intensity of this artist with a wild mentality. The memory of the land of rains, distant from nostalgia for Nature and embedded in the hybrid prose of the metropolitan, permeates works that arise from a conviction in the rebellious potential of artistic experience. Matter is subjected to metamorphosis; symbolism pierces the certainties of everyday life; the vertical challenge of the painting once again moves us in an almost primal way.
Fernando Castro Flórez
