GABINETE DE PINTURAS
Recent work by Alberto Ámez at Espacio Líquido. April, 2019, Gijón.
(PACO NADIE)
Alberto Ámez presents his painting in this exhibition. This statement, which may seem obvious, is the best expression of what will happen when we see these paintings, that is, they will be present to us during the time we are in front of them. But we must pay attention, there is something more than what we see. As the painter indicates with his lucid literalism, “they are landscapes with
figures”, backgrounds on which the form intervenes modifying its environment, “theme of recollections, observations and memories” inspired by the vision of the Asturian landscapes and the north of Leon and Castile”, in which some characters appear as ghosts among the fog and the luminous gloom of the north.
According to Alberto Ámez himself, “these paintings have a uchronic air”. To try to understand what happens in them we could say that they show us a scene created from a past moment in which what happens occurs differently from how it actually happened, thus being able to change the subsequent history. How do we observe what we live or live what we observe? How does the way we observe our environment, objects, what happens around us and our memories modify their own nature? In this phenomenological framework Alberto presents us with these paintings that run parallel to what we have lived.
From this altered impression emerges a detailed vision of a new landscape in which details take center stage and are the indication of other different versions of the real; simultaneous stories that tell us about the importance of details and of the one who perceives them, of the relevance of those things that sometimes, overwhelmed by an excess of ‘everything’ or by the beauty of the landscape, we do not see.
“If I visit a church or Romanesque ruins, the building appears, but what is really significant is the set of elements and experiences attached to it: the environment, the landscape, some branches, some stones, the climate, the light…”
Because painting is not the mere act of painting and knowing how to use the resources that make this privileged vision possible. What is painted reveals or indicates, like the smoke that announces the fire, the restlessness that what is painted awakens in its author. As Bruce Nauman’s neon announced “The true work of art is a source of mystical revelation” or in the much more austere words of Alberto “a painting is composed with the elements of art and then there is a mysterious element”. This mystery is what also seduces us in the paintings that Alberto presents us with the humility of the “chigre paintings” but with the intensity of the romantic landscapes. As the patient observer tells us, the “process of decantation is better than revelation or explosion, inquiry, listening and observation, paying attention to the times. Sometimes drifting”, that letting go, not so much revolutionary but evolved in a natural way and returning by that path that only each one can make to the origins, beyond the roads and the drawn maps, already indicated to us by Henry David Thoreau as the only real form of disobedience.
“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately just to face the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what she had to teach, and not discover, at the moment of dying, that I had not lived.”
But there is something in these transcendental visions capable of overcoming the ties and the mystery of the real that goes from the immensity of the landscape to the details, a romantic and sublime vision, a place where expression becomes a proto-language in which everything speaks to us – “clouds, rivers and bushes, trees…. The landscape is a fable with thousands of beings”-as if with a cry and a murmur in which the form takes over the meaning and expands our way of understanding from the incomprehensible to the anecdotal. “I understand that if a painting is dense and strong, it is sensitive and meaningful”, says the painter, because, although the contemplation of nature, of those small actions and everyday objects have their importance, “the real strength comes from within”. Alberto paints from an honesty that listens without the anxiety of wanting to tell us what is so difficult to say if we also look from the inside. What seems simple is even more complex: “an interweaving in painting at subtle levels is sometimes difficult to describe”.
This Gabinete de pinturas, as this is the title under which they are presented to us, arises from an almost literal commitment to the act of painting and to nature, as generous as it is strangely mysterious. But beyond painting there is a new way of living, of listening, of understanding, of relearning what we had forgotten and, if possible, of recreating the world of the lived with spectral visions. These images place us beyond the time in which that was painted and in which we observe to face the possibility of that mystery that we do not know how to express with these words. This mystery, in turn, comes from searching for our own place in the world, because, as the painter tells us, “painting is a cultural construct. To inscribe oneself in it is to paint with conscience”.