Cupping. 50 years of painting
“Painting, first of all, is a way of seeing. What we see or how we see it is conditioned by what we know or believe.”1 John Berger, 1972
This summer, in his studio in Caracenilla, while we were talking about art and language, Santiago Serrano spoke one word: hollowing. The way he said it, and what it meant, left us silent. He told us how that word begins with an opening — the “a” — , goes through a silence — the “h” — , and is collected in the “u”, closed and grave vowel. “It’s almost a meditation,” he said. And then we knew: that would be the title of the exhibition.
Hollowing out not only names a formal action, but also an attitude. It’s not about filling, but creating space, preparing the place for something to come up. Suggest. As in his painting, where everything is reduced to the essential: plane, matter, rhythm. Nothing left over, nothing distracting.
This exhibition has been set calmly, from the desire to pay tribute to an artistic trajectory of more than five decades. When we started working with Santiago Serrano, in the summer of 2024, it was to inaugurate Marquesa Gallery with its exhibition Geometries of Silence. That first encounter with his work and his way of being in the world marked us. We understood that we were facing an older artist, not only by age, but by his way of maintaining a practice faithful to his principles, outside of fashions and the most visible circuits of art.
Thanks to the complicity of my great friend and artist Bernabé Gilabert, who put us in touch, we traveled to meet him in Cuenca, not knowing that this trip would mean the beginning of a very special relationship. Santiago opened the doors of his studio and his house, he showed us his recent work, he told us about painting, spirituality, time. We dived among his old photographs, notebooks of notes, sketches, the first catalogs marked by the passage of time, while he was teaching us works of different times with great enthusiasm. We discover not only his work, but also his way of understanding life and art: without stridency, without haste, with an honesty of his own who has nothing to prove.
As an art historian and director of this gallery, I am not interested in taking the place of the critics or making a definitive reading about the work of Santiago Serrano, but sharing from where we have thought it and why we consider it necessary today.
This exhibition is intended to be an invitation. Our intention is to bring the figure of Santiago Serrano to new audiences and to new generations of collectors, who may not have yet had the opportunity to discover a work that, without boasting or strategies, has clearly influenced the Spanish abstraction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We have the space offered by a gallery like ours – limited, but flexible – and we organize the chronological journey, so that not only the formal evolution of its language can be perceived, but also the coherence that crosses it from beginning to end. As he told me recently, “painting is the only thing in my life that I’ve been consistent with.” That phrase, so simple and so revealing, accompanied us throughout the process.
We know that his career deserves a great retrospective exhibition in a public institution that places, with the corresponding scope, the relevance of his contribution to Spanish painting. This exhibition, from the context and scale of a gallery like ours, wants to contribute to that recognition and offer a careful and faithful reading of its artistic journey.
In this journey we have had the fundamental support of much literature on Santiago, especially the Doctoral Thesis of Óscar Muñoz Sánchez2, which has been a rigorous guide to understand less visible aspects of his work. And, of course, the generosity of Santiago and Angy, who have accompanied us at every step with affection and wisdom. Carlos Ayuso, with his tireless work for months in the Santiago studio, helping in the organization of works, assembly and framing. And, of course, Rocío and Raúl, a fundamental part of the gallery and this family, who have let me take the reins of this exhibition with total confidence, supporting me in every decision and accompanying me with enthusiasm at every step of the process.
Preparing this exhibition, I have returned to a book that has accompanied me for many years: The Dehumanization of Art, by José Ortega y Gasset (1925). A text written just a century ago, but that could not be more current and connects with the proposal we make to the visitor. In a period in which the immediate always seems to have the last word, these lines invite us to recover the sincere disposition, dedication and desire for exploration as forms of encounter with art:
“Art has always been difficult and has demanded sacrifices and efforts and humility from those who wanted to enjoy it. (...) I do not understand how the one who goes to an exhibition is pleased to find paintings there similar to those he has already seen countless times and does not demand rather that the walls propose intact coasts of newborn continents. Can art have a higher mission in life than to allow us a virtual evasion of the everyday, of what we already are and already know? Perhaps what is most valuable in man is the instinct of exploration: that desire of flight that leads him to escape from himself, that dark restlessness that strikes him as an emigrant bird attracted by all palpitation of horizons. Someone has said that to live is to want to live longer, an appetite for expansion, a confused discontent without sadness, daily discontent that is like a love without a loved one and like a pain that we feel in members that we do not have. Let us try to excite in neighboring souls these migratory impulses. Goethe said that whoever wants to understand the poet must move to the poet’s land. The recommendation is sharper than it at first seems and applies to all the arts.”3
I think the work of Santiago Serrano is just that: a silent continent that allows us, if only for a moment, to get out of what we already know. And if we want something with this exhibition, it is that those who visit it let themselves be carried away by that “dark restlessness” of which Ortega y Gasset spoke, that impulse of search that inhabits the very heart of art.
Because, as Santiago himself says, “The work of art is always reborn with the gaze. He lives in the present. And it is the eye of the beholder — by stopping, by beholding — that completes and makes sense of it.”
Mariana Rey
September 2025
1 John Berger, Modos de ver, Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 1974, p. 15. (Original ed.: Ways of Seeing, BBC/Penguin Books, 1972) 2 Óscar Muñoz Sánchez, Santiago Serrano: Tras el velo de la image (painting and work on paper 1967-2013) doctoral thesis, UNED, 2014. 3 José Ortega y Gasset, La dehumanización2-23.