Figurative painting adapts to the world of contemporary art. It borders its limits with abstraction, merges with other disciplines, modifies its supports, but resists, despite its ancient tradition, in an ecosystem that demands innovation. Not only does it survive, it dominates. This can be seen by anyone who visits the 52 member galleries of Arte Madrid that are organizing openings, special schedules and meetings with creators until Sunday, as part of the Apertura Madrid Galleries Weekend. Among these new exhibitions spread across 52 locations, in at least 21 there is a representative of the new figuration, a specialty that reached its peak about two years ago and that is “easier to sell than other types of pieces,” as the gallery owners say.
“Figurative art offers something that people identify with and makes it more marketable than conceptual or archival works, for example. I have been involved with the gallery for 15 years and I must have sold two photographs in my life,” says Fer Francés of VETA Gallery. The space, a pioneer in the multiplication of galleries in Carabanchel, opens the season with oil paintings by Maciej Kosc, watercolors by Abraham Lacalle and a group exhibition of Mexican artists. But painting has not always had its place in the contemporary offer. In the 90s, it was supplanted by the emergence of new trends such as relational art, video art or the emergence of experimentalists like Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin.
“All this is due to fluctuations in the market. There was the heyday of contemporary photography, then video art and installations took over. But figuration endures and is once again experiencing very critical moments. Today we are organizing exhibitions that save its producers, such as Isabel Quintanilla,” says Íñigo Navarro, representative of the Leandro Navarro gallery. Pictorial realism survives because there are still artists who keep it alive. Despite the increasingly broad possibilities of languages, painting is usually an author’s first approach to art. It doesn’t matter if you later choose another discipline, drawing, dyeing a paper is a natural instinct.
“You don’t know a 14-year-old who tells you he wants to be a videographer. Painting comes naturally; in the end, the market chooses for decades or years where sales go and so on, but the painting will continue to appear,” says Amalio Garito, partner of the Herrero Tejada gallery. Their bet to open the season was the artist Jan Valerdú, expressionist in his lines and with elongated and contorted figures, in which improvisation plays a crucial role. Utopia Parkway is a gallery that has remained faithful to its approach to figurative painting for 30 years. “Painting is as old as our existence. It will never die, but it will never be intended for the general public either,” says co-founder Lola Crespo about her space, which once included photography and sculpture before opting for pictorial realism.
natural trend
The Spaniard of Greek origin Adamo Dimitriadis now exhibits at Utopia Parkway. The canvases he exhibits seem to take place in an apocalyptic and dystopian future, in which man seeks answers in science. All with a clean and careful brushstroke. Dimitriadis is another of the nationals with whom the gallery adds to its list of creators who harvest realism and those who have already visited its galleries such as Alberto Pina or Concha Gómez-Acebo. The Leandro Navarro gallery has the same vocation as a home for Hispanic realist painters and has dedicated exhibitions to Isabel Quintanilla and Carmen Laffón. “We promote realism because we understand that in Spain there have been excellent examples of this painting. All our artists have grown up, to some extent, at the Prado Museum,” explains Navarro.
If the expansion of figurative art is explained on the part of the creators by a natural inclination and a Spanish heritage (see the Realists of Madrid or the School of Olot), how is its popularity understood by the buyer and the consumer? “Figurative art satisfies what the public needs: beauty and optimism”, responds the director of the art department of the Nebrija University, Pablo Álvarez de Toledo. Associating figures with forms that are already known or that address the human being or his environment challenges the spectator. “Beyond the market and cultural consumption, figuration is more accessible than other disciplines that require a certain culture or visual context. If I take my mother and put a performance Abramović and a painting by Valerdú, he will tell me: “I understand the latter a little better,” analyzes Gaitero.
“Painting is a very practical thing for a client to buy. The collector who buys works for his office, his home, whatever, feels an attraction to painting. It is something that connects everyone. Someone who has not visited an art exhibition can find coincidences and see themselves reflected,” adds Francés. For other gallery owners, such as Navarro or Crespo, it is also due to the boom that figuration has had in recent decades in England (David Hockney), Germany (Lucian Freud) or Italy (Giorgio Morandi). “I sell very well. There is a community of loyal, committed and competent collectors who seek out these artists,” explains Crespo.
Tradition and modernity
While it is true that the brush and canvas are the favourite tools of contemporary Spanish artists, it is also true that they explore the limits of the pictorial and flee the academicism that portraiture or landscape can be. A combination of tradition and contemporaneity, this is what Nacho Martín Silva (Max Estrella gallery) ventures into. The Madrilenian is inspired by the naturalism of Henri Rousseau to include the plant world in his paintings, but by fragmenting it into several pieces that form a single one, like a puzzle. “I am a great debtor to the entire history of art, to everything that happened before me, but also to conceptual art,” says the artist.
Martín first imagines a composition based on several canvases that form a story. Then he finds an image that interests him – for this exhibition he merges taxidermy with the plant kingdom – and divides it according to the proportions of the canvases he has designed. “I have always painted and drawn, I have never considered doing anything else. The other formats I used were always to talk about painting,” says the painter.
Roger Ballen (Camera Oscura Art Gallery) relies on Polaroid photographs; Diego Benítez (Galleria Alberto Cornejo) recreates diaphanous colors to suggest landscapes on the horizon; and Pipo Hernández (Nieves Fernández) covers his paintings with other materials such as ribbons or intervenes with holes. “Figuration also adapts to the demands of innovation. You will not find painters of marines or portraits that are too parochial,” concludes Álvarez de Toledo.
Another taste of the institutions
For gallery owners, this new look at painting is contrary to the discourse promoted by institutions. Museums and cultural centers want to promote formal experimentation and avant-garde originality, even if this does not coincide with market trends. “Biennials, fairs and other activities promoted by institutions have long left painting behind, and currently in Spain we see that it is not dominant in institutional programming,” defends Francés. “I don’t think it is a type of art that is promoted. The slow return to painting is not as evident in galleries in itself“Immersion is now very fashionable and is expanding to other spaces,” explains Álvarez de Toledo.
Behind the market trends and the preferences of collectors lies the taste of gallery owners. The vast majority say they have not surfed the wave of expectations, but their proximity to painting and figuration is rather linked to a palate acquired from a young age. Francés grew up in an environment linked to the art world; Navarro always wanted the best figurative works to be taught in his rooms; and Garito wanted a wooden space for his space, with high walls, where light could penetrate through the windows to highlight his paintings. As Crespo defines it: “This boom has not followed us at a different pace.”
