The picture as a work idea
“Not all are valid for painting; there are many who deceive themselves, and thus they crash against the difficulties of art.” Titian1 “This is an art called painting, which requires fantasy and dexterity of the hand, to find things unseen, looking for them under natural aspects, and to hold them, so that what is not, is.” Cennino Cennini, Libro dell’Arte.2 “Man has made the stars speak a language of images which they will never possess.” Santiago Serrano. Notebook of Notes
A convincing account of what has happened in abstraction over the last fifty years has in Santiago Serrano (Villacañas, Toledo, 1942), a protagonist, worth the paradox, as deep as evident. In other words, no history of abstract painting is credible that does not deal with its very long trajectory and, going through it, does not underline a succession of stages and moments in which its works have contributed decisively to the formulation of the feasible routes for the practice and material development of painting.
The logical extension of a prologue to a gallery exhibition does not allow such a task to be tackled, on the other hand already accomplished, often certainly in the stages attended, and indisputably fasts from the great retrospective exhibition that its importance deserves.
I will therefore stick to a few brief notes, both chronologically and in relation to specific pieces.
From the first works that can be described as having their own stamp, at the beginning of the seventies, he knew how to become independent and begin to delineate a program as neat as austere, in which he combined an extraordinary formal precision and a chromatic diet that were ideal for the establishment of a characteristic and unmistakable iconography, in which, over time, he has established a universal vademecum of references, mythologies and poetic resources.
A first example is Amarillo, an oil on canvas from 1970-71, of generous dimensions, of a shining solar splendor, as powerful of formal anatomy as it is rich in light flux that, a few years later, I would describe in this way: “the painting was not an idea, but a working idea”.3
That idea would extend its arms throughout the decade, as rigorously as frugal, in paintings in which dark colors predominate – black, gray, various lands – and almost non-existent forms, in which the surface is either compacted into a nearly everything, interrupted or sustained in a lighter and clearer strip, or is divided into fragments of diffuse and cottony limits.
José María Moreno Galván, preclaro, analyzed his work thus: “Serrano has a great time dividing and distributing a two-dimensional surface in a series of modular compartmentations. But, in reality, within himself, he is one of the men who is helping to create a new awareness of plastic space and even living space.”4
Surely, the pièce de résistance, of that stage is Triptych PROPAC, exhibited for the first time in the Madrid gallery of the same name in an exhibition with Carlos Alcolea (1949-1992) and Nacho Criado (1943-2010) in 1976, which was defining, according to Serrano “of what happened in the following decade”, and that would have its logical prolongation in another more numerous year, to which I contributed personally in the following one of Caja. The triptych, of large dimensions, apparently monochrome background, builds by means of a repeated and uniform brushstroke, a unique layer, vibrant and, at the same time, absorbing.
The artist himself referred to it in a way that is applicable to other paintings of those moments: “Here painting, camouflage, makeup, is deposited, storing, economically, with order, slowly and osmotically, to form a layer, a level, with a determined density, which added consecutively to another pictorial process, will ultimately form a mask. The picture hides itself, mimics, integrates, defines itself, pretends to be, pretends to be. The color matter bathes the picture, is deposited on it. Color does not define anything, it defines itself. It's matter. The color of matter does not evoke, does not relate, specifies.”5
At the end of the decade, the color brightens in small cardboards, sequenced in more or less wide strips or parcels now well delimited, in grays and also in violets, blues and yellows, which combine presence and construction of space.
The eighties were not particularly easy for him, but in their course they came slowly to set new purposes of spiritual upliftment. These were the years in which its links with poetry and the realm of the mythical were definitively forged. Apologizing in advance for the reiteration, I will repeat once more that in order to define this quality of his it may correspond to the Stimmung (sensation as yet unconcreted) that Schiller described in a letter to Goethe, on March 18, 1796: “The feeling lacks in me, at first, a precise and clear object, the latter is not formed until later. What experiments at the beginning is a certain musical mood, which is then followed by the poetic idea. For Santiago Serrano language and form are permanently and strongly attached and locked.
In the last corner of the decade lived, however, a then extensive stage in which both elements knew especially happy moments and, from the title itself, suggestive: Nones, Briefs, Crossroads, Hollow and Memory, Circles of Ash, Rondó, Bread of lime, which if not preceded, they led to another way of formulating the idea of taking the painting to other places, expanded, outside the painting. His exploration of the structure of the formats to reach the degree to which form and symbol are visible but, at the same time, indistinguishable in their concrete specificity, continues to inform a current trend in artists and, especially, in many artists of the present hour, whose results offer an exciting conversation compared to that of Serrano. A similar judgment can be made when, let’s say just the opposite, his paintings refer to what we would say minimal plastic expression, based on an almost priceless wealth of material procedures that bring it closer, although not inevitably linking it, to another contemporary trend, sliding or climbing, everyone can see it as he judges, towards the zero degree of painting.
I will conclude by mentioning a series, begun at the end of the nineties, the Shores, in which the frame of the painting is presented as a large and voluminous container-window, divided or by the same moldings that make it up or by flat bars painted in a surface-territory on which a curve and sensual curve of painted color partially extends.
I had the opportunity to present them in his sample in the Salas of the Cultural Center of Conde Duque, in 1999. “They impose” – I wrote then – their majestic and solid presence, accentuated by the width (shadow eave) of the frame, which is here a vertebral component of the image, and which the painter considers ‘the house of the picture’, for, from the harmonious partition of its surface, from the economy of its means (nothing far from the usual in the artist, but which here unfolds towards its limits carried by the flight of color), they provoke subjective emotions, intense.
Mariano Navarro August 2025
1 Carlo Ridolfi, “Life of Titian”, quoted in Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, eds, Artists on Art, John Murray, 1990. Taken, for my part, by Dore Ashton, “Tiziano, a man for painting”, The Nude in the Prado Museum, Galaxia Gutenberg. Círculo de Lectores, Barcelona, 1998. 2 Cennino Cennini, Libro dell’Arte, publishing house Akal, Madrid, 1988. 3 Juan Antonio Aguirre, cat. Santiago Serrano, Ministry of Culture, 1981. 4 José María Moreno Galván, ctálogo Santiago Serrano, Grosvenor Gallery, Madrid, 1973. 5 Cited by Juan Antonio Aguirre, op. cit.4