Luis Francisco Pérez Redondo on the Santiago Serrano 2024 exhibition
Before I started writing this comment about the work of Santiago Serrano (Villacañas, Toledo, 1942), I did the same check that I usually do when it comes to Spanish artists with a long and fruitful career, and more or less of the same generation: check what works the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía owns of them.
In this particular case I was pleased to learn that the museum has five magnificent paintings dated between 1976 and 1996. These works have allowed me to confirm the rare and very interesting discursive fidelity that Santiago Serrano has always maintained in his work, even when belonging to different temporal periods the work, in the wrong appearance, seems to reflect formally different works, and that is certainly so, but that “difference” does not imply an alteration of the vital / creative constants that in his work are strongly established since the seventies.
In fact, the paintings belonging to the collection of Reina Sofía seem brilliant prologues, or “openings”, of later works, in which we check the sophisticated deductive structure so “brand of the house”, and so suggestive in the ocular reception of a complex “combinatory”, rather than simply “organization”, where the paintings establish an affirmative seduction with persuasive strategies, or of visual “enchantment”, belonging to the same visual quality.
and in turn what seems “sculpture” (it is not and the artist does not consider them as such) corresponds to the two-dimensionality of the pictorial plane by other means and resources, but without ever abandoning the tension that in the work of Santiago Serrano always occurs between painting and its expansion or spatial development.
And naturally, this is the case in the magnificent current exhibition that with the title of “Geometries of silence” has been curated by Mariano Navarro, author also of the excellent review of the artist’s work in the exhibition catalog.
Santiago Serrano exhibition at Marquesa Gallery
Precisely from the text of the catalogue we know of the desire of Santiago Serrano for the lyric of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl, author of a work, in its scarce twenty-seven years of life, very important in the German-language literature of the twentieth century.
It is certainly not a fact that lacks importance, since poetry (as an inspiration and reference) is also a doer of the creative discourse of our artist.
I would say more: the geometrization of these fabrics, which is at the same time very soft and delicate, acquires its maximum expressive power largely thanks to a refined “poetization” of the planes and structures that make up the works; being the geometric aided, very important, by the wise use of some colors that seem to come from the ancestral red paintings of Tuscan or yellow initiatory times: deep clayey ochres or non-marine blues but very important, by the wise, by the use of colors that appear to be silent.
In reality, we could perfectly “interpret” these works as landscapes that emerge from the organic background of nature represented in its purest abstraction, which reminds me of the beautiful expression of Ramón Gaya on the non-color in Velázquez’s painting: the clean and excited ashes that reach the fabric through the air and there serenely perch. If we assume that these pictorial structures are landscapes, or could be, it is because, in fact, they are natures, but transfigured natures.
Santiago Serrano exhibition at Marquesa Gallery
“Difference and Repetition” is the title of an important essay by Gilles Deleuze, of which we are going to use a phrase / idea to continue analyzing the work of Santiago Serrano. At the beginning of the essay we read: “I make, remake and undo my concepts from a moving horizon, from an always off-center center, from an always displaced periphery that repeats and differentiates them”.
The phrase is as beautiful as it is diaphanous, and in truth it seems that he is talking about our artist and the laborious organization of montage (in its cinematographic sense) that he performs in each and every one of the works -whether they be paintings, whether they are delicate structures on paper- in which there is no fixed “center”, if movable and off-centered, which is what allows the structures that we contemplate to be, in effect, geometries of silence, but in which we can also be qualified.
That is, a poetics of the forms that the artist relentlessly makes, remakes and undoes, from a horizon that is always the mirage of an endless repetition in the difference. They are flat, of course, what we observe, but even more images. Or what is the same: structures of abstract knowledge that aspire to something more than the passive reception of their very presence and beauty.
The first meaning of the word “structure” (which is always the drawing of a greater architecture) by the dictionary of the RAE is “The distribution of body parts or something else”. We finally got to where we wanted to go. These silent pictorial architectures are also parts of a body: a vital option demanded by a thought structure that works and remembers.
An exhibition certainly very intelligent and beautiful.
Luis Francisco Pérez Redondo
November 2024