UNA ISLA DENTRO DE OTRA

Abraham Lacalle, (Almeria, 1962). In this exhibition the trees, the stones, and let’s not forget the water become the real protagonists, where the color escapes into space to highlight these natural places. All the elements that make up the paintings, whether appropriation or not, resonate as indispensable parts of their relationship with the outside world.

The title makes reference to a sensation —I can’t say if it’s reliable— that I have when I am in an island. It’s that of repetition. As though you were a dot moving across a screen, bouncing against its sides randomly, and so on successively. The worn-out world within other worlds.

For this artist, painting is, to a certain extent, a perverse form of thought, an unfolding of “games of language” which lead us to uncharted domains. “Perverse —warns Lacalle— is to subvert what you expect from yourself.” To do that which you know not. To drift away from the “know how,” to leave behind mannerism, to assume the ethical imperative of: “You must change your painting.”

This painter doesn’t find joy in any form of reductionism, in no way does he linger around the (mystifying) aesthetic of silence which, as Beuys remarked (against the infection of duchampitis) is “overrated.” To a great extent, the paintings of Lacalle establish analogies between the wooded and the metropolitan, basking on those labyrinthian spaces where anxiety can perhaps trade places with pleasure.

Lacalle opened at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, the enormous painting entitled Inversion stood out; like he indicated, at first, it was an allusion to culture as a rescue crafts, of healing pleasure but also an allusion to the MEANING of museums, something that he had already dealt with in his exhibition at “Space One” of Reina Sofía, with the somber semblance of “a space where nothing ever happens.” That painting of more than eight meters showed a rescue boat broken in half and capsized, addressing, no doubt, the market.

Fragments of “Una isla dentro de otra” (Notes on Abraham Lacalle’s painting). By Fernando Castro Flórez.