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1/5/2008

Anton Lamazares

Gallery Kai Hilgemann, Berlin

Living in Berlin for the last 3 years, the monumental city par excellence, Antón Lamazares has searched in the Prussian capital the space of loneliness necessary for painting. Perhaps should I have better said for keeping on painting, because, as far as I now, he has not stopped doing so for, at least, thirty years, but art is an activity constantly re-started and, therefore, it demands to display strategies of distance or, instead, a distancing that can be physical, although mainly emotional, that which moves someone further away from himself to reunite later with a deeper intensity. This psychological wander of the creator has taken shape, not only a few times, from a change of country, but in the case of a visual artist, it enjoys from the beneficial performance of being presented as the radical challenge of expression through a silent language, that needs no translation, which forces to put the situation off without any kind of alibi. In any case, it turns out that Lamazares lives now in Berlin, not only the most monumental city, but the most reconstructed, and therefore this experience refers to a thematically vertebrate exhibition about houses, a high voltage subject, which is meaningful from any point of view.

The Latin term used by Lamazares to entitle this series of painting is Domus Omnia, which, I think, could be translated as “Everything houses” or, as he seems to do it, “Houses forever”. In any case, interpreted in one way or the other, the paintings of Lamazares have been house-shaped cut or, indeed, they also represent houses. This painted country house has nothing to do with an urban landscape, no matter how much effort someone makes to identify the spectral silhouette of any building. Actually, it has to do with houses as shapes that float over an indefinite space, the opposite of the realistic visual order of a veduta or, in general, of any kind of painted urban landscape. It is neither a painting about houses, nor about the city, not even, deep down, painted houses, but paintings in which the formal concise silhouette of some houses can eventually be recognized. It is, in short, painting with houses. It is painting.

With or without houses, the painting of Antón Lamazares has always stated a brutalist inclination towards the matter and the gesture; I will call them “innocent”, not exactly the same as “spontaneous”. Lamazares is, we must not forget, a mental and technically very complex artist. For example, he can use an ordinary cardboard as canvas, but, in his hands, well-pressed and varnished, it gets the shine of a polished wood. His “scribbles”, which mimetize childish carelessness or rudimentary schematism of self-taught artists, are impregnated, whatever the figurative motif is, with subtle refinements. His punctures and stains of the surface never derive in melodramatic aggressions discharged as in Pollock or as in Fontana, but they reveal delicacy. In short, his brilliant sarcastic vein does not show a compassionate identification with human beings and caricatured situations. All these notes are only the manifestation of a complex and paradoxical being, one who is not easy to label. In that sense, his relationship with the so called Art Brut is and, above all, has become more and more relative. It is true that he has a temper, and he composes a figure of provocative thick strokes, but anyone who knows him personally, or goes deeper into his work, quickly realizes that this is the way a very sensitive person uses to mask himself, whose will to paint without concessions can become violent.

This strain between opposed forces, that first appeared in his way of being and doing almost from the beginning, has not disappeared, nor has mitigated in the painting of Lamazares in all these years, but, with good reason, after all he has lived and painted through more than three decades now, he has opted for an ever growing sophisticated manner; that is: one with more demand, complexity, richness and control. This is what should be appreciated in this exhibition, which gathers a series under the name Domus Omnia, in which spectral cut out silhouettes of indefinite buildings are still, as mentioned before, floating shapes, whose aligned appearance does not distract us from a thousand pictorial details, that enhance the orographic relief of the humble matter used, the poetic care of the brushstrokes left as snub, the very subtle dotting and incrustations, and, above all, the beautiful chromatic atmospheres, as in a watercolour, where the brightness of transparencies, worked through repeated layers of varnish, shines with a deaf evanescent luminosity. This way, as we soak in the substantial background of Antón Lamazares’ last paintings, we finally realize, not without emotion, that Domus Omnia, far beyond individual translations, does not mean other thing but “House of Painting”. Francisco Calvo Serraller

Opening 2.May 18-22

Gallery Kai Hilgemann
Zimmerstrasse 90/91, 2. Hof Berlin
mon-sat 11-18, Sun 4.Mai 12-18

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