ORILLAS

Santiago Serrano (Villacañas, Toledo, 1942) began his artistic career in Madrid in the 1970s, alongside a group of artists who led the return to painting as the dominant practice. Since then, and with his own aesthetic vision, he has consistently shown throughout his work a commitment to abstraction, which he pursues with an austere language and great formal and chromatic purity.

Serrano operates within the parameters of the most uncompromising abstraction, giving his works an apparent simplicity that conceals deep reflection and a careful, demanding process in which everything is precisely calculated. Always faithful to a pure conception of painting as an immediate and spiritual art, he has discovered new approaches to the use of colour and to the possibilities offered by material textures and the heterogeneous forms of his works. Colour has gradually become charged with contrasts and filled with glazes and transparencies. His most recent works, which make up this exhibition and are titled Orillas, represent a synthesis of his visual universe.

“… The latest paintings by Santiago Serrano —the series titled Orillas— involve a reorientation of previously established interpretations and are, undoubtedly, a germinal step in a new direction, leaving a deep impression on the viewer’s sensibility.

… Interestingly, Robert Rosenblum chose Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea to begin his history of contemporary art as heir to Central European Romanticism; Rothko titled one of his key 1940s paintings Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea—in which the influence of the emptiness of Miró in the 1920s and Klee in the 1930s is evident, along with the mark of Gorky—and Santiago Serrano has chosen the title Orillas for his latest series, in which one can detect, I believe without error, the fulfilment of a pictorial and poetic intention.

Orilla comes from “aura,” and the artist does not accept the meaning of a line that limits a surface or of a boundary between land and sea, the course of a river, etc. Nor, I believe, does he particularly like other meanings given by María Moliner in its verbal form orillar: to arrange, organise or untangle a matter; to avoid or circumvent a difficulty or obstacle.

On occasion, artists’ works become entities endowed with their own identity, occupying and even invading the viewer’s space. Something similar occurs with the pieces I know from this newly begun series. They impose their majestic and solid presence—accentuated by the width (shadow eave) of the frame, which here is a structural component of the image and which the painter considers “the house of the painting”—and, through the harmonious division of the surface and the economy of means (not far from the artist’s usual practice, but here pushed to its limits by the flight of colour), they provoke subjective, intense and lasting emotions, a privilege of great art.”

Mariano Navarro (“Santiago Serrano: The Shadow of the Gaze”, 1999)