L’ULL PERSEGUINT LA PINTURA
A couple of months ago, Carlos Franco opened an exhibition at the Casa da Parra, whose works are, to a large extent, the seed of this one in the Barcelona space of Miguel Marcos. In Santiago de Compostela I was asked for a text, published in Galician in the catalogue, together with another by María Escribano, the exhibition’s curator, and some fragments of that book that Carlos Franco has been promising for a long time and which —I know, we all know— he is inevitably writing.
Miguel Marcos suggests that I add to that text a kind of prologue that situates Carlos a little, since the one they are preparing is his first solo exhibition in Barcelona. I accept gladly, not least because I have the paintings so fresh in my memory that I think I could even sketch their arrangement on a floor plan. However, when I try to write a prologue, what comes out is an epilogue, and instead of writing about Carlos, the text turns into a text starting from Carlos. And all because of the questions that arise.
Let me explain. It is difficult to justify that Carlos Franco has not yet appeared on the Catalan scene in a way that the quality of his work demands, and I will not be the one to criticise the excessive localism of some programming, nor the subsequent insistence on confronting the local with the foreign, turning what is close into something strange. Seen from the outside, one misses spaces such as the Galería Ciento in the early 1980s, which became for artists from the Madrid environment something similar to what the Galería Buades was in Madrid for Catalan artists: an oasis, a reference point, a necessity. This was how Xavier Grau, José Manuel Broto and Carlos Pazos, Carlos Alcolea, Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Juan Navarro Baldeweg saw it at the time. As I write it, I feel that they are, inevitably, also the names of Miguel Marcos.
Overly tied to the Madrid scene, Carlos Franco is on the way to becoming —if his Galician and Catalan ventures do not prevent it— an isolated, strange, solitary artist. Precisely what he does not want to be. Because few painters move conversation toward painting as quickly as he does, and few have his ease in laying their cards on the table and revealing their own key ideas. It is also true that few have his ability to enter into projects that anyone else would consider impossible. I suppose that the inevitable distance imposed by time with friends (drastic in cases such as Carlos Alcoleaand Rafael Pérez Mínguez, two good interlocutors of Carlos Franco) and certain objectives eventually led our painter to a very particular idea of studio, of workshop: a refuge where echoes and conversations abound.
Carlos Franco has given visual form to the Aeneid and has dared to take on the mural paintings of the Real Casa de la Panadería, presiding over the Plaza Mayor de Madrid. He is therefore capable both of the most intimate and evasive exercise and of the most demanding weight of outdoor painting: paper versus wall.
On a recent visit to his studio, seeing for the first time his paintings on aluminium, with Carlos insisting on turning off the lights so that we could observe the effect of fluorescent colours on the retina, the underlying argument becomes clear: Carlos Franco is inside painting and behaves like it. Hence his —slightly— tempered surprise, for he is a painter of uncommon technical skill.
What broad exhibitions —in works and dates— such as those in Santiago de Compostela and Barcelona reveal is the way his paintings are interwoven, the gazes through which his characters intersect, the variations on already sketched themes, the openings toward new territories: an attitude akin to twisting painting’s neck. For this reason, Miguel Marcos’s concern is merely prudence: paintings such as these, shown with the vital rawness of Carlos Franco’s, have never needed prologues. In any case, the invitation is made: it is compelling to physically enter the paintings, to inhabit those landscapes in which many things occur and overlap. Ultimately, the viewer’s eye also becomes gesture, a fleeting brushstroke.
The eye chasing painting
Carlos Franco is not an easy painter. Anyone wishing to approach his work should not expect the complacency of a stable language, nor the recurrence of complicit winks or games of seduction. He does not belong, therefore, to the lineage of painters who remain faithful to a set of resources they refine or overload according to the intensity and interests of the moment. Nor is he, fortunately, among those who adapt their work to the rhythms of their surroundings, to changing, ephemeral, and attractive fashions.
His case is precisely the opposite, though this does not mean we are dealing with a solitary or a misfit. The traits that define him allow for contradictory profiles to be drawn, perhaps because he is a painter who embraces risk and struggle, nonconformity, and a conscious positioning at the limits. A painter who inhabits that space where images are about to crack, to break apart, sometimes leaning toward excess, other times toward lyrical intimacy. A painter who does not respond to external programmes and does not fear entering difficult territories. His works are tests of investigation and collision, from which much good painting feeds: the magma that precedes the crack.
Secreto a voces (“Secret in Plain Sight”) was the title given by Juan Manuel Bonet to an essay written in 1996, when Carlos Franco exhibited in three galleries surrounding the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (and hopefully neither detail remains merely metaphorical, and the painter soon achieves the recognition his work as a whole demands). The text brought to light names such as Carlos Alcolea, Rafael Pérez Mínguez, Luis Gordillo, and Guillermo Pérez Villalta, companions in artistic endeavour and debate since the 1970s, and now essential references for understanding what happened in Madrid’s studios in recent decades.
The image, the portrait drawn in that account, is of a solitary figure difficult to follow, who participates in few exhibitions yet remains highly present when theorists review recent painting. A defender of a path of his own.
Carlos Franco first became known at the Sala Amadís, directed in the early 1970s by Juan Antonio Aguirre, who was determined to give space and prominence to a new generation of artists. From that group emerged much of what gave intensity to the Madrid figurative renewal of those years. Carlos Alcolea, Rafael Pérez Mínguez, Guillermo Pérez Villaltaor Chema Cobo appear as key figures.
Much has been said about the debt they owed to Luis Gordillo, to the point of jokingly using the term “gordillism” to resolve a difficulty: explaining the close relationship maintained by very young painters with another, more established artist, yet one far removed from what were then the dominant lines of prestige. Over the years, the most insightful texts about that dialogue were written by the painters themselves when speaking about their peers: Luis Gordillo evoking Carlos Alcolea on the day of his death, and Carlos Franco referring to Gordillo a little over a year ago. In the end, what becomes clear is both the formal relationship (visible in the early works of the “Carlos”) and the subsequent exchange of influences, always grounded in an independence that speaks well of those who engage in dialogue.
“In our dreams begin our responsibilities,” said Lou Reed, and those of Carlos Franco seem clear. We are not, however, dealing with a predictable painter, one who remains faithful to a single way of working, to a gesture assumed as his own. Carlos Franco could have insisted on an iconographic line close to Gordillo, or to R. B. Kitaj or Larry Rivers, and yet he chose a tense attitude —in this he is very Kitaj— distancing the images. For we are dealing with a painter whose work we understand through the discovery of his attitude. An attitude that, once again, is difficult to uncover because it is concealed, interwoven with his own references.
Active in the figurative debates of the 1970s, in which he showed himself to be sharp in painting and remarkably free in drawing, Carlos Franco does not maintain the exhibition rhythm of generational peers such as Guillermo Pérez Villalta or Manolo Quejido. In his case (as in that of Carlos Alcolea) there is a certain caution, related both to the rhythm of his painting and to the intensity with which he engages in undertakings as diverse as the maritime altarpieces he creates with Aurora Márquez; the illustration of the Aeneid; or the mural paintings for the Real Casa de la Panadería in the Plaza Mayor de Madrid. What is striking is that, in the latter two cases, the project begins as a commission that the painter takes on to the point of extending it beyond what was agreed. An unbounded commitment.
His contact with Virgil gave him tools to engage with a mythology he had always kept in mind, allowing him to be at once unruly and lyrical, thanks to narrative liberties and the perfect alignment between the project and his mastery of drawing, gouache, watercolour, and muted tonal ranges.
“‘To paint the Eneida,’ wrote Ángel González García, ‘one must dig into the asthenic darkness imagined by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; restore its enchanted light; read it again, letting oneself be entangled and carried away by the wind that runs through it; make visible its rough tangle of sensations.’ Far from the cultured ambition of Nicolas Poussin, corresponding with his collectors and debating the classical sources that advised him to modify the iconography of a mythological scene, Carlos Franco goes straight into battle, somewhat like the late Pablo Picasso did.
In the paintings of that period, as in those made ten years earlier or those he is showing now, ten years later, what is advisable is not to settle for a detached and calm vision, for that total control of the painting advocated by old manuals of aesthetics. One of the traits that unifies the work of Carlos Franco, and one of the points where the attitude from which he paints is revealed, is the need for the viewer to transform their eye into a brush and move through the painting as if it truly were what the painter has always imagined: a habitable space, an inhabited space.
We are not dealing with one of those painters of gesture and matter who use both to leave a trace and testimony of their sensations: Carlos Franco moves through the paintings —at times corrosively, at others mercilessly, sometimes playfully, always drastically— the sensations of the moment. The works are confessional insofar as they reflect what happens, but they do not fall into the excess of the merely testimonial, and it is in this intermediate point that much of their originality lies, as well as the difficulty that complicates their classification.
At the beginning of 1995, Carlos Franco led a workshop at Madrid’s Círculo de Bellas Artes, under a specific proposal: “to create a common work. Common in terms of its group execution.” He started from the idea of the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse and proposed that practice should bring to light “the strangeness of the private unconscious,” while “mythology will represent the collective unconscious.”
Looking at the paintings he has produced in recent years, especially those on aluminium supports resolved with fluorescent inks, one is led to think that he is the first to put into practice what he advises his students. The most striking result is the expansion of the visible moment. Leaving the room and returning under different lighting conditions, half-closing or closing one’s eyes for a few seconds —primary perceptual tools— takes on a new meaning here: one could admit that painting continues to work, that the painting changes on the retina, that the pursuit of the eye already suggested by his works of the 1970s is maintained.
The difference, however, is fundamental: Carlos Franco displays an attitude so detached from fashions and stable formulas that it creates an added tension in the images, a kind of final uninhibitedness that takes over a painting in which the most unruly attempts coexist. It may sound strong to put it this way, but these are paintings that demand time to unravel their pictorial weave. Paintings that resist being confined within frames.”
Miguel Fernández-Cid
