Luis Paltré and the poetry of bottles

Almeria,

Luis Paltré is an artist with a long career, although little sonorous: He has combined the creation of his work with teaching in the same field of drawing and the plastic arts, building a solid and never strident production, and in recent years he has received awards from the City of Albacete Plastic Arts Biennial or from the Tomelloso City Council (which bears the name of Antonio López).

The Museum of Contemporary Spanish Realism. Starting this weekend, MUREC of Almería is dedicating to her the exhibition “The Reality of the Tangible”, curated by Juan Manuel Martín Robles and which includes a selection of works from recent years, seen in the exhibition as manifestations of the objective attitude from which Paltré approaches her craft. It is not intended to generate emotions in the viewer, but rather to offer them the fruits of an attentive and rigorous look at what is visible, neither more nor less.

Born in Cabra at the end of the fifties, this author acquired a solid foundation in the management of drawing, color and composition at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Seville, and since his beginnings he has remained faithful to figuration, not to the desire to copy. Paltré does not seek so much to recreate what she sees as to shape her interpretation, but to do so she has never fallen into hybrid languages or abstract or conceptual paths.

He knows well the tradition of the genres he has chosen (he has especially examined Morandi, Filippo de Pisis or Edita Broglio), but he does not bring it to the present from melancholy, but rather by updating its codes: he always paints from direct observation, seeking balance and giving a lot of importance to light, and from these unrevolutionary procedures he manages to make his realism a current and valid style without excuses. His images are diaphanous, clean and insistent on a small number of themes: still lifes, interiors, landscapes and architecture.

Not even her medium formats convey any grandiloquence, and the spaces in which she focuses are extremely everyday, lacking human figures, but not their traces as objects: they are her workshop and the places where Paltré’s life takes place.

Without detaching himself from verism, he sometimes works, as a priority, with planes of color in which he examines nuances and depths in tones and also giving primacy to the fragment, both in interiors and in the immediate surroundings of his home: another proof of his desire for stripping and simplicity. Speaking of outdoors, where he always develops in plein air easel in hand, those that we will see in the MUREC correspond, above all, to views of the industrial areas of Fabero and the farmhouses of rural Almería. Paltré is interested in areas far from urban areas, but her ways of working are not separated from those employed indoors: fair means, very measured finishes, an austere palette in diversity and nuances.

It leaves no room for spontaneity; opt for the care of the plane, the line and the volume. Liquid modernity is left out of his fabrics.