The outstanding feature of this Still Life is the dense and pasty texture of the paint in a composition dominated by earthy, ochre and golden colours with a few grey and greenish touches. From this, the figures emerge: some fruit, like a pear situated on the central axis in the lower part of the canvas, or those contained in a transparent fruit bowl or dish located on the left, barely insinuated with brushstrokes that outline its semi-circular edge. On the right of the central pear, it seems possible to make out the light outlines of the faded silhouette of a glass. At the top right corner is another receptacle whose contents are not entirely clear. Next to it, in the upper strip, is an arrangement of other forms that may be more fruits accompanied by something which could be deciphered as a bottle, or another glass object, of which only a fragment appears, as it is cut off by the upper edge of the canvas. Two energetically traced oval forms cross the central area of the picture, their identity even more enigmatic. One of them might be read as the figure of a banana, but the faintly descriptive character of its right-hand end loses definition as it is prolonged to the left, almost removing any certainty unless we assume the fruit is being transmuted into something else. At the same time, it allows the receptacle on that side to be endowed with a transparent and therefore crystalline quality.

The difficulty in fully discerning these figures, together with the fact that they emerge from a flat surface, is the result of a deliberate pictorial policy. In this oil, one almost discerns a procedure that Pancho Cossío had already adopted during his Parisian residence of the 1920s, and whose result is a premeditated indecision between the option of defining the objects and that of ceding protagonism to the purely pictorial elements. Hence the figures are merely suggested while the canvas is taken over by the touches of the brush and palette knife, their density and their trace, and the interplay of textures, glazes and transparencies. Cossío sometimes moves to the edge of abstraction, never renouncing the real referents to which these simplified figures allude, yet endowing them with a fluctuating character that blends with the pictorial space.

The composition is thus extremely bold, with some objects sharply outlined against an absence of spatial depth. In the meantime, the range of earthy colours is a hallmark of Cossío’s painting, as is the fine drizzle of small white dots on some of the darker portions of the canvas.

Pancho Cossío painted this canvas at a point in his career when he was already consolidated as one of the leading representatives of the Spanish “new art”. In the 1960s, as we can appreciate in this work, this veteran of “lyrical figuration” and the Paris School displayed a bold creative freedom. Also palpable in this picture is his enormous interest in the “kitchen of painting”, which materialised in the meticulous use of traditional pictorial techniques that led him to make his own colours by hand. This was decisive for giving his painting that oily appearance which is so characteristic of his language.

Cossío returned to the still life, the genre of modernist painting par excellence, throughout his artistic career. The Banco de España Collection holds another still life by this artist, Still Life with Ace of Clubs, from a nearby date, 1955. In a lecture on the artist given precisely in 1955, “Pancho Cossío and the pictorial tradition”, Juan Antonio Gaya remarked that he continued the history of uncluttered order of the Spanish still life tradition, virtues which were nevertheless also characteristic of Cubism, “and it is logical that a post-Cubist should be well equipped with them.” He also pointed out another of the features found in the two still lifes in this collection: his taste for oval organisation and the curved line, which submerges us in a spherical world of roundnesses like “an endangered ship, like a towering wave, like an excessively low and dangerous cloud.”

Maite Méndez Baiges

Pancho Cossío is a major artist who is considered alongside Benjamín Palencia and Velázquez Díaz as a link between the avant garde and the post-war years in Spain. He enjoys a high profile in Italy and the USA as well as in Spain. Towards the end of his career he broke away from the yoke of fascism and managed to take off on his own path of works structured around materials and textures that he applied skilfully to achieve clearly thought-out visual effects. Through gouaches, sandy textures and collages in silent, phantasmal, introspective hues, he explored the use of clear, bright colours produced by grinding and baking earth after the fashion of the painters of 17th century.

He painted this still-life in 1962, as part of the series of sand-based words to which he devoted the last part of his career. It is an essential, intuitive work where he does not so much show off the elements of the composition as allow them to seep through from a limitless background, on which the fruit and objects depicted seem to rest.

Frederic Montornés