26/04/2018 -
29/04/2018
Puxagallery participates at Paper Positions Berlin with Santiago Serrano and Fernando Peláez, both Spanish artists from different generations and dissimilar experiences, who offer two unique views when recreating the pureness of painting nowadays. They defend both tradition and experimentation while searching for singularity and avoiding fashion or trends.
Many have been the awards obtained in the last forty years by Santiago Serrano (Villacañas, Toledo, 1942), author of more than seventy individual international exhibitions and with an established presence in books, essays, and surveys of twentieth century European painting. A member of the great generation which emerged in the seventies, he is today one of the very few who maintains intact those ethical and aesthetic principles – singular expressiveness, non-conformity and commitment to experiment – which marked a milestone in the evolution of Spanish art. In the last two decades he has intensified his pictorial activity, adding to his body of work numerous works on paper and digital techniques, and has received among other awards the National Etching Award for uncompromising works whose enigmas reach the highest level of quality, south of fashion and north of any interpretive dogma. He is an artist who is aware that his investigation is a record of well-understood silence and, perhaps, proof of the importance of continuing to paint.
The paintings of Fernando Peláez (Gijón, 1965) are a direct consequence of his ethical and spiritual stance towards life, continuously moving between passion, the irrational, the imaginary, disorder, exaltation, colour, and a delicate brushstroke that recalls the great Romantic painters. Unlike them, however, he does not seek an archetypal or symbolic language, nor aspires to emphasise the sublime. Rather, he slowly penetrates real or imagined natures as if they were a sanctuary, contemplating the behaviour of material forms. His works on paper, of humble appearance, are nourished by complex reflection and an almost monastic attitude indebted to silence and an obsessive desire to read poems, and this often encourages him to include long texts among his titles, letters, and elements from graphic design. In a number of pieces, he paints the back of his works to filter pigments, oils, bitumen, and colour – generally earths – which are nothing more than formal pretexts for sincere tributes to literature, philosophy, or history.
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