The Latin term used to entitle this series of works is Domus Omnia, which could be translated as 'Everything houses' or, as he seems to do it, 'Houses forever'. His paintings have been house-shaped cut or they also represent houses. This painted country house has nothing to do with an urban landscape, no matter how much effort someone makes to identify the spectral silhouette of any building.
Living in Berlin for the last 3 years, the monumental city par excellence,
Antón Lamazares has searched in the Prussian capital the space of loneliness
necessary for painting. Perhaps should I have better said for keeping on
painting, because, as far as I now, he has not stopped doing so for, at
least, thirty years, but art is an activity constantly re-started and,
therefore, it demands to display strategies of distance or, instead, a
distancing that can be physical, although mainly emotional, that which moves
someone further away from himself to reunite later with a deeper intensity.
This psychological wander of the creator has taken shape, not only a few
times, from a change of country, but in the case of a visual artist, it
enjoys from the beneficial performance of being presented as the radical
challenge of expression through a silent language, that needs no
translation, which forces to put the situation off without any kind of
alibi. In any case, it turns out that Lamazares lives now in Berlin, not
only the most monumental city, but the most reconstructed, and therefore
this experience refers to a thematically vertebrate exhibition about houses,
a high voltage subject, which is meaningful from any point of view.
The Latin term used by Lamazares to entitle this series of painting is Domus
Omnia, which, I think, could be translated as “Everything houses” or, as he
seems to do it, “Houses forever”. In any case, interpreted in one way or the
other, the paintings of Lamazares have been house-shaped cut or, indeed,
they also represent houses. This painted country house has nothing to do
with an urban landscape, no matter how much effort someone makes to identify
the spectral silhouette of any building. Actually, it has to do with houses
as shapes that float over an indefinite space, the opposite of the realistic
visual order of a veduta or, in general, of any kind of painted urban
landscape. It is neither a painting about houses, nor about the city, not
even, deep down, painted houses, but paintings in which the formal concise
silhouette of some houses can eventually be recognized. It is, in short,
painting with houses. It is painting.
With or without houses, the painting of Antón Lamazares has always stated a
brutalist inclination towards the matter and the gesture; I will call them
“innocent”, not exactly the same as “spontaneous”. Lamazares is, we must not
forget, a mental and technically very complex artist. For example, he can
use an ordinary cardboard as canvas, but, in his hands, well-pressed and
varnished, it gets the shine of a polished wood. His “scribbles”, which
mimetize childish carelessness or rudimentary schematism of self-taught
artists, are impregnated, whatever the figurative motif is, with subtle
refinements. His punctures and stains of the surface never derive in
melodramatic aggressions discharged as in Pollock or as in Fontana, but they
reveal delicacy. In short, his brilliant sarcastic vein does not show a
compassionate identification with human beings and caricatured situations.
All these notes are only the manifestation of a complex and paradoxical
being, one who is not easy to label. In that sense, his relationship with
the so called Art Brut is and, above all, has become more and more relative.
It is true that he has a temper, and he composes a figure of provocative
thick strokes, but anyone who knows him personally, or goes deeper into his
work, quickly realizes that this is the way a very sensitive person uses to
mask himself, whose will to paint without concessions can become violent.
This strain between opposed forces, that first appeared in his way of being
and doing almost from the beginning, has not disappeared, nor has mitigated
in the painting of Lamazares in all these years, but, with good reason,
after all he has lived and painted through more than three decades now, he
has opted for an ever growing sophisticated manner; that is: one with more
demand, complexity, richness and control. This is what should be appreciated
in this exhibition, which gathers a series under the name Domus Omnia, in
which spectral cut out silhouettes of indefinite buildings are still, as
mentioned before, floating shapes, whose aligned appearance does not
distract us from a thousand pictorial details, that enhance the orographic
relief of the humble matter used, the poetic care of the brushstrokes left
as snub, the very subtle dotting and incrustations, and, above all, the
beautiful chromatic atmospheres, as in a watercolour, where the brightness
of transparencies, worked through repeated layers of varnish, shines with a
deaf evanescent luminosity. This way, as we soak in the substantial
background of Antón Lamazares’ last paintings, we finally realize, not
without emotion, that Domus Omnia, far beyond individual translations, does
not mean other thing but “House of Painting”.
Francisco Calvo Serraller
Opening 2.May 18-22
Gallery Kai Hilgemann
Zimmerstrasse 90/91, 2. Hof Berlin
mon-sat 11-18, Sun 4.Mai 12-18