Calo Carratalá, a history of the landscape

Valencia,

The Valencian artist Calo Carratalá, who in recent years has starred in important exhibitions in his community but who since the nineties has been regularly exhibiting in European galleries, has specialized in the representation of nature, in part and conceptually from a romantic vision that exalts its beauty and power, the majesty of the mountains or the calm of the forests, but adopting a personal aesthetic.

A landscape painter forever, Carratalá studied at the School of Fine Arts of Valencia and later completed his training at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome; That stay in Italy would prove decisive in the years to come. In his production, large-format works inspired by the frescoes of Roman monuments predominate, as well as tondos, also based on those circular compositions of the Italian masters.

Travel is vital in his creative process: he immerses himself in the places he visits, armed with a sketchbook, to try to capture the sensations that those panoramas produce, noting the colors and size of the elements and then working on them in his studio.

In any case, and beyond all these sources of influence, Calo Carratalá’s pictorial choices are filtered, as could not be otherwise, by evidently contemporary readings of the landscape. If Renaissance painters considered the representation of the world as a form of appropriation, this artist wishes to emphasize his change of perspective regarding this approach: he understands that current creators face, unlike their predecessors, a nature that must be protected.

However, technically, the Valencian tends to use well-known procedures since the 15th century. It applies linear perspective, theorized as we know by Alberti in 1435, in his treatise From Pictura; Its main objective is to paint the real, respecting its exact proportions and considering the human perspective.

The result is works that, as we said, exalt nature, both tormented and magnificent. From the snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees to the Amazon jungle, in his canvases he wants to reveal the sublime character of certain territories, in the sense that they surpass human beings in their immensity and the power of their parts. At the same time, he interprets them from an intimate point of view: he practices painting as an introspection that may invite the viewer to imagine distant lands.

Calo Carratalá. Every place is provisional. Bancaja Foundation

A review of his last decade and a half of work can be visited, from today until next June, at the Valencian headquarters of the Bancaja Foundation under the curator of Marisa Giménez Soler. The anthology “Everywhere is provisional” has brought together almost forty compositions in small and large formats that belong to three fundamental series by the artist, shown together for the first time in Valencia along with some pieces made specifically for this occasion.

Few geographies have resisted him: snow-capped mountains of Norway will appear in our path, reflected with an austere and melancholic color palette; the environment of the Amazon in Brazil and Peru, in pencil images on paper, in which concise lines synthesize vegetation, weeds, reflections, waters and skies; the landscapes of Tanzania and Senegal, marked by their intense greens; and baobabs, trees linked to local African cultures and traditions, which Carratalá chooses to capture with the sanguine technique and which also pay tribute to the collective work for the survival of ancestral generations.

In all of them it is easy to appreciate the free and energetic nature of his gesture, his tendency to sketch and his desire to synthesize the sensations generated by air, color and time and proclaim, as the title advances, the need to preserve what is represented, immeasurable but perhaps not eternal.