2023-11-24 05:00:26
“The countryside is a metaphor,” writes Miguel de Unamuno in “Spanish adventures and visions.” And also that a painting teaches like a book and even more and better, of course, when it is good. Every artist paints from memory, he says, even what he is seeing. And the artist paints the image that he receives of the present object and this image is always a memory, even when he sees it for the first time. All imagining and even all knowing is remembering, Plato already knew it, and “every memory is a metaphor,” he adds.
The metaphor, he concludes, is the foundation of the consciousness of the eternal, and that is why no great landscape designer has been one of vast panoramas, because the genuine landscape is made up of small corners, which is where the soul of the countryside is captured. A reflection with which Agustín García Benito could not agree more, whose work, exhibited in the historic building of the University of Oviedo, is undoubtedly a metaphor for his Castilian land, its desert and often frozen plateau, the fields plows, with endless horizons only interrupted by church bell towers and dovecotes, to the point that in another parallel exhibition that has just closed at Espacio Local in Gijón, he showed his series of drawings in which pigeons discharge their clouds of lead and finish off the pieces with their excrement.
Born in Fompedraza (Valladolid) in 1961, he graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country and has been a full professor at the Oviedo Art School, where he resides, but in the end he always returns to his origins, even if he does so with certain distance: “I look at my works as I look at the family house that I lived in and that no longer belongs to me,” he writes in the catalogue. The Gijón exhibition was titled “Inhabited Geometries”, because it is aware, with Ortega y Gasset, that there is a “geometry of the plateau” and that in this everything are straight lines, since “Gentleman, in Castilla there are no curves!” The one from Oviedo is titled with a defective Latin language, “Coepi”, and is a retrospective that represents a new beginning for him and synthesizes at the same time more than twenty-five years of work.
It presents two series, the first of which, the one called “Blanca”, began in the nineties. It is a “rough and hard” series, as defined by its curator, the gallery owner and also artist Pedro García, who emphasizes the need on the part of Agustín García Benito to “leave a record of the passage of time on the surface, adding pigments, recomposing, reaffirming gestures, imprinting new rhythms, creating other geometries, adding brush strokes and adding textures, crossing out, covering, scratching, tearing, breaking, trampling. While allowing the white to appear, drown and hide, assuming the impossibility of an ending, because not There can be an end to a work, nor should it be anchored in a beginning.”
They are works that will never be finished, because, after a while, the artist returns to them. In this way, the author himself describes, “white appears to us as the advanced stage of a process of formal purification, of search for essentiality, in which emptiness, light and matter progressively affirm their presence. The surface , her skin, is presented as a record of the passage of time, as a landscape of memory, as a territory that speaks of its own history. The paintings allow us to guess the numerous works that have accumulated over the years, one on top of the other. , to show us its orography. The matter and empty space give way to a living silence.” In the catalogue, the vice-rector of University Extension and Cultural Projection, Pilar García Cuetos, who is an art historian, reiterates the idea of surface and “the skin as a metaphor”, in a sense diametrically opposed to the superficial, since the artist “has chosen to address the transcendent” and openly show “the wounds of war, the damage to life, the battles, the defeats and the victories.”
The other series on display, more attractive and with more color, is called “Stratos” and is a natural continuation of the “Blanca” series. It is defined as “a look through time and a step in favor of the corporeality of the work and the incorporation of space and light to it.” Agustín García Benito is also a doctor in Prehistory, Archaeology, Social Anthropology and Historiographic Techniques from the University of Valladolid and, as a memoir of an excavation, clearly shows the different layers of which his work is composed, fed, already has said, of a specific landscape that sometimes acquires even a volumetric dimension, like sediments of a fundamental field of vision in which the anecdote is not resorted to but is synthesized through metaphor, which, as Ortega y Gasset also said, , “it is probably the most fertile power that man possesses.”
I started
Agustín García Benito
Historic building of the University of Oviedo, Calle San Francisco 3, Oviedo. Until November 26
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