Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos | 02.10.2020 > 21.02.2021

Unlearning to see again and thus be able to separate the painting from the servitude of the image. These words can summarize the way of thinking that supports Álvaro Negro´s latest work (Lalín, Pontevedra, 1973). It is painting in which the creative process shapes its essence from spiritual evocation. It is a reunion with the European artistic tradition, with its humanistic roots. Everything that the painting knew alludes to the very will of the work, its aesthetic formalization and the direction that the painting follows until it begins to take shape. "It is the painting that decides the format, the foundation, the color, the texture," Álvaro Negro says, "until it begins to emerge." But the painter´s disposition is essential: the use of chiaroscuro, the superposition of layers and layers of paint and the use of delicate glazes create a subtle atmosphere. It creates a vaporous color, arising both from the encounter with the canvas, and from the subtraction of matter, both of which are capable of generating a unique spatial illusion.

Álvaro Negro´s painting requires a calm and expectant gaze. It demands concentration from the spectator, allowing themselves to be caught by the rhythm of what is added and subtracted in the process. It demands spiritual communion with the work and with the artist´s touch and does not forget its historical relationship with the European painting of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Giotto´s ´transcendental naturalism´ - the break with distant Byzantine iconography and the radical change he undertook by replacing it with a realism that took the viewer into account, without forgetting the eternal meaning of the image - supports the aesthetic scaffolding of the painting of our artist: ´How to make, ”says Álvaro Negro – a correspondence between the “presence ” of the corporeal, the emotional, the humanistic and the divine (the absolute) tangible”.

To a large extent, this is where the exhibition that Álvaro Negro is putting on at the Caja de Burgos CAB Art Center arises. Color, light, material, surface and visual values bring Álvaro Negro´s painting closer to the admired frescoes of the thirteenth century, to the tables and oils of the Renaissance chapels, to the baroque canvases and twills. ´[It is] an aesthetic position that assumes creative development from the existential´, the artist tells us, and which begins with The pictorial presence as a motif, a project carried out during Álvaro Negro´s stay as a resident at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome and that marked the inauguration of a new pictorial cycle that is now in full progress. The recent Dea Roma exhibition, in the Madrid F2 Gallery, has shown this with works already painted in Spain, but which maintain their genealogy in the review of the tradition of western painting, which is not unconnected to the artistic heritage of Burgos. The exhibition at the CAB puts forward an ensemble review of this period with the intention of showing the links between the contemporary and the historical and, by extension, between two cultures as interwoven as the Italian and the Spanish.

+ Dea Roma