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This year, Galicia pays tribute to the Galician painter José Otero Abeledo, Laxeiro (Lalín, 1908-Vigo, 1996), after the Royal Galician Academy of Fine Arts decided to dedicate this year’s Day of the Arts to the great artist, one of the fathers of the Galician pictorial avant-garde. On the occasion of the Laxeiro Year, an extensive program of activities has been organized, including the exhibition ‘he was a man. Laxeiro in America (Buenos Aires, 1950-1970)’, which will remain open until July 24 at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts. It borrows the title from an outstanding work by Laxeiro from the 1960s, ‘El Foi un home’.
The Galician Government, through the Cidade da Cultura Foundation and in collaboration with the Lalín Council, is organizing this exhibition with the aim of disseminating the legacy of one of the great innovators of Galician painting inside and outside Galicia.
After being inaugurated at the Ramón María Aller Museum (Lalín) and, after passing through Madrid, it can be visited in September at the Gaiás Center Museum (Santiago de Compostela) and in January 2023 at the Cervantes Institute in Paris.
Curated by Carlos L. Bernárdez, historian and art critic, the exhibition gather forty pieces, coming from various institutions, focused on the period of maturity of this international artist who settled in Argentina for twenty years. It is a selection of some of the most important works that make up the Universal Catalog of Laxeiro, a project directed by the Laxeiro Foundation that, after ten years of research, saw the light.
The figure of Laxeiro is part of the historical Galician avant-garde, in which, at the beginning of the thirties, a restless group of young artists and intellectuals, known as The Renovators, started an aesthetic update project. Born in rural and traditional Galicia and fascinated since he was a child by the stories of the living and the dead, he catalyzed like few others the vision of the world from Galician popular culture, from which he builds a totally innovative work.
Between 1931 and 1933 he lived in Madrid, as a free student at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, receiving a scholarship first from the Lalín City Council and then from the Pontevedra Provincial Council. There he visited the Prado Museum almost daily and attended gatherings in the cafés, where he met Galician intellectuals such as Otero Pedrayo, Castelao, Vicente Risco and Suárez Picallo. He also attends the Granja del Henar, where he meets Gómez de la Serna, García Lorca, the Dieste brothers and Valle-Inclán. In 1942 he settled in Vigo and exhibited regularly both in this city and in Santiago, Bilbao and Madrid.
In 1951 he traveled to Buenos Aires to participate in the exhibition entitled ‘Galician Artists’, organized by his friend Luis Seoane, commissioned by the Galician Center of Buenos Aires, at the Velázquez gallery. Since then, he has established his residence there until 1970. That year, and after the great retrospective dedicated to him by the Art Gallery International in Buenos Aires, definitely return to Spain, also encouraged by the creation in his homeland, Lalín, of the Museo Laxeiro. At this stage he already enjoys prestige and begins to receive tributes and recognitions, in addition to carrying out an intense exhibition work. In 1996 he died in Vigo at the age of 88.after the opening of the anthology at the Galician Center for Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela, which was also exhibited at the Conde Duque Cultural Center in Madrid.
Carlos L. Bernárdez emphasizes that the exhibition «wants to contribute a new look on the work of Laxeiro in full maturity, the one he carried out during his long stay in Argentina between 1950 and 1970. Laxeiro’s trajectory in these years helps us to link the art made in Galicia with the very important intellectual nucleus exiled in America, more specifically in Argentina«. This is the case of Castelao -already dead at the time- and Luis Seoane. Among the Galician exiles there had been or were painters and writers such as Rafael Dieste, Lorenzo Varela, Maruja Mallo, Manuel Colmeiro…
According to the curator, Laxeiro’s Argentine stage «makes him move in a cosmopolitan and Galician environment at the same time, open to all kinds of influences and contacts, although with an intense fidelity to themes of Galician tradition. Works like ‘Foi un home’ (1963) or ‘Jefe azteca’ (1964), with their radical feelings, approach the psychological portrait, reproducing the sensation of suffering and intense pain«. An aspect that, in his opinion, links Laxeiro’s work to post-war European movements that show a ruthless portrait of contemporary man and connects him with artists such as Antonio Saura o Willem de Kooning. “Laxeiro is therefore on their side children of tragedy that the world lived in the forties«, warns the curator.
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