Madrid,
Five years ago, shortly after the opening of the We Collect Gallery in Madrid, Barcelona artist Alan Sastre presented one of the first individual of this space: “Losing the map.” He collected that shows a selection of his abstract paintings then recent, in which he using tones or dark tones explored the possibilities of provoking emotions from polyvinyl acetates, moisturizing agents, acrylic spots, alkynes real, a pigment obtained from a mollusk (the Murex Brandarisa cane that lives in shallow waters), which requires thousands of copies to get only some dye, and hence its very high price.
It was possible to try to find in their works signs, signs of alphabets, dynamism, principles of landscapes or gestures that lead to those who contemplate towards the theoretical origin of the light present in these pieces, which remains there despite color extensions, low its layers, and even if it is almost opaque. His ultimate purpose, as Pablo Castañeda has defended, is to use his discipline to articulate and transmit questions, playing with the dualities between the hermetic and the obvious: its matric side, normally blunt, and its brands seem to affirm the pictorial presence in space , but if we get closer to these pieces, and perhaps we observe them from its sides, we will often discover Planity, an apparent fading of the gesture, represented more than presented. Both perspectives, the distant and next, were nevertheless necessary when attending to these creations; The look was to be active.
For this artist, the still stillness of the finished painting is a strict fruit of the artist’s last movement and also of the fluidity of pigment and water, which splashed and spread, so their contemplation through a reproduction or screen will be only the reflection of an absence, since there is not in the copy that past story of the composition, of the construction of the veil or membrane that tailor equals with the pictorial surface. It is difficult to know if their strokes are fruits of a more or less spontaneous energetic activity or a meticulous decision and a laborious process, nor the tools from which the brushry or their smooth finishes derive, but that not knowing comes to accentuate to what extent These images are at the service of sensation or mystery, and the viewer must handle himself in doubt.
The Catalan has returned this month to We Collect, now called Río & Meñaka, to exhibit a new series of paintings: thirteen compositions that approach the figuration to a much greater extent than the rest of its production so far, when they are nourished in part of his recent visits to the Prado Museum and his thorough observation of Rubens, Corot or Watteau’s work. In any case, its first source continues to be the reflection on the relations between the present and the absent, the joy of a pleasant vision or the attention to everything that ensides the artist’s mind at the time of creating, inevitably in relation to Your own memory.
In the text that accompanies the exhibition, Constantino Molina, connoisseur of the author, points out that these works are the fruit of authors, made in the state of grace: from that good moment the diversity of their frames on the same reason would attest; Devaneos between what appears and hides, remembered and forgotten; and also the dynamism derived from its constant games with lines, points, spots or sweeps. We can read these images, arising in front of a lake or in the merger with the landscape, as ads of the joy of seeing.
Alan Sastre. “The augury”
Río & Meñaka
C/ Count of Aranda, 20
Madrid
From February 6 to March 15, 2025
