Exhibition at the Neilson Gallery (Grazalema, Cádiz), "lejos". Painting.

2006 spring

The Unconventional Landscape Artist or
The Nature of Things

(This text, like all texts, threads together curiosities, chances and discoveries; truths and attitudes which only need time to germinate.)

1st Movement: The Image

A figure dressed in white - overalls which are partly white, but mainly iridescent, green and earth toned - laborouriously climbs the hillside. It holds a large tube in its hands, wears thick-soled boots, a red rucksack on its back. Below and with each moment further below, is left a village of cramped and identical houses, protected by the company of loneliness and a suffocating sun. The man continues on his way up the steep slope. The ground, stony and dry, is dotted with scrubby vegetation which is reduced to scarce patches further up.
We could perhaps suppose that the figure in question is the artist and that the summit is his objective. Nothing would be further from the truth. The tiny plateau on the hilltop is only a starting point, a hillock from which the investigator of realities will meet with his true opponent.

2nd Movement: Antecedents

Two or three years ago we were surprised by the revolution within David López Panea´s painting. We asked ourselves what this total switch to Landscapes, such a forgotten (when not being reviled and insulted by its contemporaries) School, was all about; a School which had been reduced to expressing denunciations and the consequences of human activity.I His work gives glimpses of valleys and mountains which united in their beauty hide behind the supreme stillness of their uniqueness, pristine. The magnificence of the cliffs, crags and slopes lay in their pride at never having been set foot on, never conquered. They were presented as lands with no past, with no memory, lands open to being impregnated. A far-away and mythical space open to conquest, open to not being conquered by a race of men such as Lucrecio describes, those who 'each day force the rainforest to retreat higher up towards the mountains, leaving space below for growing crops, the aim being for meadows, lakes, streams, cornfields and hills and plains of fertile vineyards…'II
In Panea´s studio I suggested the title 'Land of Giants' for that collection of canvases, which in the end was exhibited under the name 'Mystic'.
As I go through the index of images which came from the artist's time in the 'Cabo de Gata' (Almería) I come across a revealing photo. Taken from very low down the artist seems to rise up in front of his canvas which is anchored to the ground - only just held down by stones - behind stretches a line of towering mountains - so far, so near and well-defined - they are left beneath the waistline of the giant- creator, ready, as were his mythical ancestors ´to pile mountains up to reach the highest stars´IIIand to terrorize the fainthearted and worldly gods which now sit on olympic thrones. It seems that we weren't following the wrong track, after all.

3rd Movement: Consequences

Strangely enough, the artist is fully aware, while he proceeds towards an analytical operation, of this dimensional de-compensation. He has some significant thoughts about one of his drawings:
´It's my body that's projected before the canvas - he discovers - (….) and in some ways the mountain is a prolongation of myself.' Faced with the enormous vacuum created by these intangible landscapes, humanity, rather than dissociate himself, cancel himself out or hide, moves forward using a paradoxical ruse to avoid being overwhelmed by them: he measures and identifies the unknown through the parameters of his own body. In the article ´Memory and Light' which deals with the human landscape and the memory of ´La Isleta del Moro' the poet José Angel Valente reaffirms the process of self-identification: ´…we find in this land a true space where nature seems to recognize itself and where humanity can, at the same time, recognize itself in nature.'IV The artistic act that López Panea undertakes transforms itself thus; at the same time an aesthetic experience and a cognitive revelation.

4th Movement: Strategies and Truths

We could just limit ourselves to the figuration of deep classic roots and known bias. We could stay there: limiting ourselves to the initial layer of the form and the way it is represented. Contemporary artistic critique has, in many cases, fallen into such poor reviews, based on prejudices coined during the vanguards, and then polished for post-modernism. Such slight anathemas would never be allowed in anything that wasn’t pictorial expression. The usual and eternally moribund painting has faithfully served as the punching bag for insolent, sparrings, but with little waist and even less technique. If, as Kuspitv indicated, art, having lost its aesthetic value along the way, has entered into a phase that he so clairvoyantly calls “post-art”, it is thus possible for us to detect a current that tries to react, without being reactionary, and that tries to turn the tide, without being turned, in favour of reconquering aesthetic values.That might very well be the case.
It is at this point that we are going to include a new term, a new concept when it comes to evaluating behaviour of Lopez Panea with his real environment and the later conversation of these encounters in artistic values: Dystopia, an abnormal place. We are fascinated by this place, contrary to our principles and our recognized standards, a landscape that refuses to be trapped by the limits of the landscape. This imaginary place fails to find its defining quality in the artist, but rather, it lies in the wild rareness and pristine purity, so distant from the parameters that dominate and measure that mankind has tried to reduce in nature, subjecting it to his own benefit since times past.
I remember the artist’s comment, referring to the view from the summit: “Up there, something is always going on.” Perhaps, all “the things we can contemplate usually hide their movements,” as the classic might suspectvi. Perhaps we have to find the ideal distance for things to be perceivable.
The ephemerons condition of constant change becomes unchanging in a “place” that cannot be considered as such.One of the values of critique with the landscape is to apply awareness of infinity and impossibility. There is no possible way to depict continual changes. With each subtle variation, a new reality is generated, one that is different, another. It is then that certainty and paradigms crack, because we face an absolute, not something non-mutating, but rather something non-existent. That is why we must evaluate his works from his double condition of order: individual and in series.
In the debate and reaction against the positions of “post-aesthetics” and “post-art”vii, a true academic dictatorship, dystopic landscape reached maturity as an alternative to and overcoming post-modernism. And he does it by accepting his condition of subsidiary to the charismatic reality, taking sides with a task that is more magical than populist, on the side of the exceptional rather than the ordinary, with reasoning rather than political propaganda, with analytical response rather than casual and original response, considering his work from the premise of labour rather than brilliance, more immanent than trivial, more transcendent than pleasant. In the light of considering the form only as the means to reach the subject, for the sake of political argument, Panea—as other true, anti-system artists—proposes the form as the confirmation of the subject, for which he is freed himself from the complexes that have, until now, limited and exiled the beauty of artist’s vocabulary since the mid 20th century.

Iván de la Torre Amerighi.

Ver: PÉREZ, H. J.: La Naturaleza en el arte posmoderno . Madrid, Akal, 2004.

LUCRECIO: De rerum natura. [Libro V, 1370-1373]. Alianza, Madrid, 2003. (p. 277)

OVIDIO : Metamorfosis . [Libro I, 153]. Madrid, Alianza, 2001. (p. 72).

VALENTE, J. A.: El elogio del calígrafo . Barcelona, Círculo, 2002. (p.19)

Ver: KUSPIT, D.: El Fin del Arte . Madrid, Akal, 2006.

LUCRECIO: Op. Cit. (p.114)

KUSPIT, D.: Op. Cit. (p.39)

Ibidem , pp. 34-38

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