PINTURAS VÁSICAS

This is not a still life.

Recently, speaking about the pictorial climate of 1979, the year in which he held the exhibition in Madrid that brought him into public attention, Alfonso Albacete told me:

“There was a somewhat absurd fear of picking up a little plant pot and painting it, of working from a life model. In the exhibition En el estudio I tried to demonstrate —and to demonstrate to others— that not only was it possible, but that it took you further than starting from an already elaborated situation (…) When you are trying to interpret something already painted, you realise that the lesson is not there, but rather in, through that form of interpretation, approaching the subject of the model again, something forgotten since Matisse in contemporary painting.”

Now, twenty years after that exhibition, those words still remain relevant. In fact, the paintings currently on display did not originate from “a little plant pot”, but from a vase in which the painter arranged flowering orange branches. The subsequent watercolour sketch is the origin of his entire latest series of works.

As we well know, pictorial representation cannot be understood as a simple mechanical duplication of the world, but rather as an inquiry, as a critically constructive gaze towards another reality. In the words of the great Max Beckmann:

“Do not forget nature, through which Cézanne, as he himself said, wanted to reach the classical (…) Learn by heart the forms of nature, so that you can use them as the notes of a musical composition. That is what those forms are for. Nature is a marvellous chaos that must be ordered and completed (…) Nothing is further from my intention than to suggest that you imitate nature unthinkingly. The impression that nature makes upon us through each of its forms must always become an expression of our own joy or sorrow, and consequently the form given to that impression must contain that transformation which alone turns art into true abstraction.”

The dual act of seeing and representing what is seen has, in the end, less to do with technical skill than with knowing what we see and how we want to represent it. And the what and the how depend on a creative will capable of generating the transformation Beckmann demands. In Albacete’s case, this transformative interpretation of reality is articulated, as I have said elsewhere, “through a system of re-creation of the gaze based, on the one hand, on the life model, and on the other, on myth, understood as a cultural ‘model’.”

The distance between the model —mental or naturalistic— and the painting is the artist’s territory. Model and painting belong to the objective world; they are contingent objects. But the process and procedures of translation that construct the painted image are a conceptual decision of the artist, belonging to his capacity to create an intelligent reality.

The Twelve Basic Paintings that make up this exhibition perfectly illustrate the complexity of Alfonso Albacete’s procedures and creative process. The painter chose as the model for a painting a simple glass placed on top of the aforementioned watercolour of the vase. Once the painting was completed, he placed the glass on it and painted another canvas from that new model, repeating the operation again and again, painting, in his own words, “like a juggler who sets a series of plates spinning on sticks that he moves back and forth, coming and going, in order to keep them balanced.”

The glass as organiser of the canvas is a recurring element in the artist’s iconography. In 1982 it appears, as a container of diverse cultures, in the series The Five Continents; and there are —also as a reference to Spanish religious painting— glasses on the floor in the works of the series The Painter in the Studio from the following year. In these Basic Paintings, which concern us here, this transparent glass, through which we continuously perceive the subtle distortions of the original image, acts as the painter’s retina in his attempt to fix what is mobile.

Fixing what is mobile: indeed, the process of physically constructing a pictorial image unfolds over time, but its result, the painting, is of an almost mineral immobility. The only thing that changes when we look at a canvas is our perceptual process. In this sense, looking at a painting replicates the painter’s gaze upon the model. To look again, then, is what painting demands of the viewer. The painting becomes a model, and by examining it, interpreting it, placing it in context, it generates thought, and we create “intelligent reality”. Ultimately, it is this creative process —that of the artist and that of the viewer— that matters.

And it is when we look again at the Basic Paintings —and the playful double meaning of the title already invites a rereading— that the content of these static forms is set in motion and we begin to understand Albacete’s intention.

Indeed, what initially appeared as a series of variations on a still life seems to be transmuted into landscape. Not only because of its appearance, but because the viewer’s point of view, static in a still life, is set in motion before this range of simultaneities, opening up to the constant tension of partial details that never fully coalesce into a graspable whole.

Before us unfolds, in space but also in time, the artist’s own process. We can follow it, go back and forth like jugglers, and witness this play of repetition and difference established between model and painting, between painting and painting, between reading and reading.

That empty glass sliding over a background that moves from lush vegetation at the beginning to the desert-like landscape of the final canvas becomes, more than a compositional structure, a narrative of painting itself. That constant decision-making that is painting leaves a trace. And it does so not only on the canvas each time, but in the process itself, increasingly open, more complex, more precise. Each brushstroke is different and yet always the same, simultaneously. Nuance is memory, variation that distances itself from the model and adds a conceptual reflection, an immaterial yet precise —or rather, certain— specificity.

“This is not a still life.” Yes, in the manner of Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” there are moments when things are seen with striking clarity. These paintings propose —apparently from within the convention of genre painting, but in reality undermining it— a reflection on the very structure of the pictorial process, in its dual speculative and physical dimension.

Armando Montesinos