Mariano Navarro "All forms are perfect" exhibition Santiago Serrano

Mariano Navarro. All forms are perfect

The experience of the beautiful and, in particular, of the beautiful in art,

is the evocation of a whole possible order,

Wherever he is.”

If anything defines the work of Santiago Serrano is, surely, the extraordinary tenacity with which it has deployed over time the formulas to keep in force a mode of painting sustained in the most austere of the presence of the pictorial, linking it, paradoxically, with a sensuality, as growing as nothing voluptuous, of color and materials, and a narrative richness in the human that affirm it as a fundamental figure of the Spanish art century.

In no way is it possible to summarize a trajectory close to six decades in the introduction to an individual exposition, but it is possible to enunciate the two seminal and decisive arguments of this one, born and derived, of course, from his own practice and experience.

In the first place, a continuous evolution of the deployment of plastic forms, both interior and object. From the traditional format of the painting to the most sophisticated presentations of the painting on supports that enunciated several of the possible geometric figures and their construction in space; together with the composition of a vocabulary and a syntax for their plastic expression, as deeply linked to history as wide in the extension of their cultural borders.

Second, his deep and permanent conversation with the world of symbols, myths and in general with the narrative that constitutes us in people and what perhaps, having followed his work first hand since the beginning of the seventies, I have not paid as much attention as privileged its material pictorial aspects.

It thus maintains a dialogue with the depths of the existential that has a first verbal coagulation in its titles. Most often a non-objectual expression less poetic – Hollow, Hollow and memory, Bread of lime, Flag, Shore –, also that of the works of this exhibition, Silenciarios and chimeras, Souls-chimeras, Adorchimera.

“Titles are important as much as they make sense. A title can define a work, but not occupy it,” says Santiago Serrano, in one of the last interviews we have had.

And here it is quite pertinent an appreciation of Ó scar Muñoz, author of an essential doctoral thesis on the artist: “Painting [understood] as an aesthetic device, bearer of beauty and sensory enjoyment that, from the conceptual link that the author establishes between title and image, appeals to the intellect of the viewer raising questions about essential aspects of the world and our existence – time, space, emptiness, loneliness, death, silence, communication.”

Thus, and referring only to previous works, Serrano explains: “The instruments of passion were the bases in lines of some forms, the triangle, the rectangle, the circle, the curve and the straight line. Sickle and scythe. They were forms that for me were loved instruments, passionate, with which you play time, you play life.

Instruments of passion I, 1997 Mixed technique on wooden structure, 250 x 40 cm. The artist's collection

The others are the Nones, paradigm of the connection that the work of Santiago Serrano forges with a spirituality daughter of the physical materiality of painting. Something that always comes with your work.

“In the Nones I have exercised painting on form. I painted the form. The form is created, all I have done is play, in its broadest and anthropological sense of the game. Animals learn by playing, like children, or like animals. We can call it play, or induced synergies, synergies of chance.”

From those years are also Brief, four X's of different sizes, also painted, resting against the wall in mounts that may well be random.

And it is impossible not to repeat a quote read this morning: “The French philosopher Alain Badiou says that artists are in charge of giving shape to what has no form.”

Brief II, 1990 Oil and vinyl on canvas, 225 x 400 cm. (4 pieces) Collection of the artist

The titles and their physical pictorial translation reveal another substantial aspect to his understanding of the ways of doing, a very close and deep relationship with the poetic and poetry – endorsed by the formal richness of the words, their meanings and etymologies – that has been reflected in many of his creations.

We will focus on one in particular, because of the genealogical relationship with the work that we now present: “Trackl’s Rondo, a painting from 1990, is painted in a very cheerful way, with yellows, ochres, temples and blues. The rondo is a grunder washer, that is, a circle that surpasses itself, that rides on itself, where it ends up mounted above itself. At the same time a rondo is a circle dance, is cheerful, spring, and is danced in the field. The strange thing about Trackl’s poem is that it mentions colors, yellows, sienas (browns), blues... and they are always glaucous colors, dark, milky, whitish, hazy, violet, they are almost repulsive colors.

I rescued from Trackl’s poems all the positive part I saw, and transformed it into a form that surpassed itself; the earring surpassed itself; that, as always, painting over the form. Now I'm doing the same thing. I paint triangles that surpass themselves.”

Rondo de Trakl, 1992 Vinyl and oil on canvas glued to wood, 202.5 x 200.5 x 4 cm Collection Banco de España

He describes some of his current paintings – a cycle that began in the now seemingly remote days of the 2020 pandemic, as “an endearing inside look at that illusion he wanted to give to others” – as “butterflies”, because their forms and deployment were suggested to him from a double source. The first is a song by Uruguayan musician and singer Jorge Drexler entitled Quimera, whose first stanza reads: “I go out to look for you, chimera / Paper butterfly / I think you keep looking / The whole life”; and very shortly after the phrases, “Leaving on the blank sheet / Scars that time prints”.

The second, perhaps more decisive, analogical sequence that defines his way of imagining: “I thought in Greek means soul,” he tells me, “the knowledge of the soul, and soul, in Greek, is also butterfly and, at the same time, worm, that is, pupa, metamorphosis; an immense extension of the range of meanings. Quimera is a poetic way of naming an illusion, something that although it is going to be carried out hardly, contains anyway a reality of its own, and it is precisely the content that time gives it while you perform it.

Works of this exhibition for whose remote origin offers an explanation that approaches the story (in its highest prosistic sense).

He does not know exactly when, but surely more than five years ago, he noticed a unique detail in the wall paintings of the tomb of Pharaoh Merenthap, firstborn of Ramses II. On one of the main walls, one of the tomb’s painters had inscribed the image of two triangles joined by one of their vertices. They became in his eyes the image of a weather vane that rotates horizontally and vertically, and which he baptized as “Fundamentals.” A main figure with whom he developed digital editions and some paintings.

“If a man is buried surrounded by all his possessions, objects and riches, everything he wanted to possess and be related in life, and they inscribe that symbol, for me,” he says, “those two triangles mean that the one above is equivalent to the one below, but the one is the present and the other is the past, or one the present and the other the future. In any case, Pharaoh was buried to live forever. That past-turned-future is what any of the pharaohs desired.”

Unexpectedly bursts the eruptive notion that it is the work of art, here that whirling movement between future and past of two triangles united by their apex rectangle, which grants, far above, and with greater foundations than the will of Pharaoh, the quality of the eternal. It is worth for us to be satisfied only with the durability of the work in the eyes of several generations.

“I don’t like the word religion applied to the work,” he says, “perhaps a more accurate term for me would be mystical. A solitary individual in the desert, with no rules and regulations other than his own and his visions.” To paraphrase a historical assertion Serrano, of being, is mystical to the extent that it is aesthetic, and is aesthetic because of its mysterious mystical root.

In a sense, it recovers the historical and anthropological symbol, while transferring it pictorially to a significance that belongs almost exclusively to its way of understanding the being, the process and the making of art.

In other words, the Nones that Santiago Serrano painted in the nineties – so close, in my eyes, to his current proposal – are as present today in what painting means, as they were in his public presentation. They are containers of time, housing the past and projecting into the future. The works live a continuous present, we are the ones who change.

What is fascinating to me in his understanding of the artistic fact is that incisive concurrence of physical and material play of forms extracted, without solution of continuity of Gestalt energies and narrative force of symbols and myths.

To the latter we have so far dedicated the fundamentals of the text, but nothing of what has been said is visible without its physical, material concreteness, with its color and its form in the works painted by the artist.

Works in which not by will artisan, but by the permanent search for the greatest possible precision to make his presence perceptible, Serrano deals himself with the complex process of construction of the support, which includes both carpentry and metal cutting, and its subsequent weaving.

They are paintings completely foreign to the tradition of the rectangle, the square, the rhombus or the tondo, which establish lines of force, tension and development of color to configure the limits of form and expand it, thus granting a subversive paraphrase of Julio González’s assertion that Picasso’s sculpture drew in space. Santiago Serrano engulfs the space in the very fact of drawing.

But this sophisticated formulation of the figure would be nothing without the definitive fact of being painted and, therefore, made of color and its combinations. And here the painter’s palette, as we said at the beginning of the text, exhibited “a sensuality, as growing as nothing voluptuous of color”. Sensual because it explores to the depths of sensitivity its ability to move our senses with a strange synesthetic power and an empathy linked to the will of communication and close contact of the artist. And nothing voluptuous, because it is neither complacent with itself nor given to slips that are independent of, deep down, his austere will.

They are not colors that the painter looks for and repeats in those offered by nature. They mostly respond to a contrast with a color if not dominant if almost always present, black. “It’s the one that gives me depth, power, mystery, precisely because of the contrast with other colors, different reds, blues, pinks ... And what I like, something that the Egyptians already used is the sfumato, that blurred in the passage from one color to another that gets that fragile border vibrates; also when two colors are put together I like to blur them because a very sensual atmosphere is created, as if one color cares the other gently.”

A final element that also plays a decisive role in making Santiago Serrano is the open admission of the potentiality of chance, and of the essential attention of the artist to small details. On August 1, immersed in the different works for this exhibition, Santiago sent me a photograph of a stone he had found in his walk through the field of Caracenilla: a stone right triangle, of elaborate appearance, to which a butterfly of the same color range had adhered, a Silencer and, at the same time, a Quimera.

Mariano Navarro

September 2024

1 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, La actualidad de lo bello, Ediciones Paidós, Barcelona, 1991, p. 85. 2 Held between 1 September and the end of that month in 2024. 3 Muñoz Sánchez, Óscar, Santiago Serrano, tras el velo de la imagen. Pintura y obra sobre papel, 1967–2013, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Faculty of Geography and History, Madrid, 2014, p. 220. 4 Abril, Guillermo, “Sergio Cabrea, filmmaker and Colombian ambassador to Beijing: ‘China discovered long ago that neither Marx nor Lenin are enough’”, El País Semanal, 23 September 2024. 5 Poems (1913), RONDÓN: Gone is the gold of the days, the brown and blue colours of the night: the shepherd’s sweet flutes have died, the blue and brown colours of the night, gone is the gold of the days. 6 González, Julio, “Picasso sculpteur et les cathédrals” (Picasso the sculptor and the cathedrals), Cahiers d’Art, 1936.

[author _ rocio]