On 12 March 2024, Opera Gallery London hosted a Curator's Tour of the "Painting at Will", an exhibition in collaboration with Succession Antonio Saura and the Fondation Archives Antonio Saura. This is Saura's first solo exhibition in London in 58 years, with a presentation of 27 important paintings, works on paper and canvas created between 1959-1997. The exhibition is on view in our London Gallery until 26 March 2024.
Led by Dr. Xavier Bray, Director of the Wallace Collection and curator of “Goya: The Portraits” at The National Portrait Gallery, and writer and art critic Alastair Smart, this event explored the indelible influence of Spanish art history-specifically Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez-on the œuvre of Antonio Saura through five thematic categories present in this exhibition: Crucifixion, Portraits, Auto-da-fé, Crowds, and Goya’s Dog.
Crucifixion
“I have tried to destabilize an image and breathe an air of protest into it [...] I am simply interested in the tragedy of a man - a man and not a God - absurdly nailed to a cross”
Inspired by Velazquez’s painting Christ Crucified (1632), these works are more hypnotic than they are reverential. Saura was fascinated by the way that cruelty can become a point of fixation, and saw the greatest beauty not in the most conventionally beautiful objects and experiences, but in the most intense. The image of the crucifixion, as he repeatedly rendered it, embodies such cruelty and intensity.
Portraits
“Focus on the labyrinth of the face. Invent a new face along the way. Forgetting it first. Then producing blind structures”
Saura’s painterly depictions of the human face function to expose and conceal at once. These works belong to a series he called his Sudarios- Shrouds, in English. They are frenetic, conceptual explorations of the human condition that obscure the sitter’s true appearance with complex psychological depictions.
Auto-da-fé
“The faces that contemplate us, arising from liquid and random technique, speaking of a dual situation born from the sleep of reason.”
The destruction of books is a gravely familiar image for anyone who has lived through a period of political oppression. Though personally deeply politically engaged, Saura directed his work more towards formal challenges. This series, comprising book covers painted with amorphous forms, suggest a kind of rebirth and flourishing of human reason following a period of repression.
Crowds
“In pride of place a shadowy elongated painting made of continuous mobile structures pitted with the gleaming eyes of a beast.”
In the gestural, dynamic painterly language of these works, we see clearly the impact that global art movements like abstract expressionism in America, art informel in France and Gutai in Japan had on Saura’s. We also see allusions to his fascination with imagery from natural science, the crowds resembling both microscopic images of cells and the constellations of the cosmos.
Goya’s dog
“The ideas of emergence, birth and acceptance are necessarily associated with the accentuated presence of the void”
Most of Saura’s subjects crowd their canvases, their presence emphatic and urgent. The opposite is true of his paintings of Goya’s Dog, where a sense of the surrounding emptiness is accentuated, suggesting the pervasive presence of mystery and the unknown. Saura once remarked that Francisco de Goya’s El Perro-‘The Dog’ in English-(ca. 1819- 23) was “the world’s most beautiful picture.” The ambiguity in this particular Goya painting with its ochre sky and hazy, enigmatic composition, seems to suggest man’s futile struggle. El Perro was one of the 14 works in Goya’s ‘Black Paintings’ series created towards the end of his life that reflected the artist’s pathos and outlook on humanity. In some ways the modest palette and composition of this haunting canvas seems to be a stark contrast aesthetically to Saura’s rigorous and sometimes severe brushstrokes evocative of angst. However, the œuvre of Antonio Saura and Goya’s El Perro are similar in their almost uncanny ability to portray the mercurial nature of the human experience.
These artworks explore enduring themes in Saura’s practice which acted as catalysts for existential and aesthetic developments. Spanning almost five decades, his career extended beyond painting into sculpture, writing, printmaking and theatre set design. This travelling exhibition, which debuted at Opera Gallery Madrid in 2023, pays homage to Saura’s artistic legacy 26 years after his death, while examining his innumerable contributions to the art historical canon in Spain and beyond.
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Videography © Rafael Irimie
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