‘Art has to be near to life and life is an error, it is a succession of lights and shadows […].Relief painting lies to you.I prefer imperfections, those where you can see that you have overdone it or you have shied away’. These are the words of Joaquín Pacheco in 2004, a figurative artist and stalwart of the artistic scene. He overlapped with different generations – he was present at the Venice Biennial as early as 1958 - with explicit references and an obvious debt to early German expressionism, Francis Bacon and Edward Hopper. His link with the German avant-garde from the turn of the century, which broke the mould of bourgeois taste,became clear from his exhibition along with the self-proclaimed ‘expressionist group’ in 1962. The works in the Banco de España Collection date from Pancheco’s later period, from the 1980s onwards, and are a sort of summary of outstanding features recovered from his career.

Beach (1987) is real proof of how his painting retained a more primativist expressionism, along the lines of the Die Brücke painters, who made the theme of beaches a hallmark through quickly executed works such as the well-known “nude in nature”. They depicted a new type of leisure that Germans saw as a kind of resistance in the form of naturism, but Pacheco saw the theme of the seashore as the setting for the new forms of tourism with no ideological pretensions that began to blight the Spanish coast in the early years of his career. This interest links his work with photographers who were his contemporaries, such as Carlos Pérez Siquier or later Martin Parr. Like Pérez Siquier, Pacheco lightened the tone of his canvases with the passing of the years to embrace themes taken from daily life, sometimes seen through stained glass or a shop window with a photographic framing. In the case of Café on the Beach (2001), a window opening on to the sea facilitates the ‘painting within a painting’ or ‘screen within a room’ effect, turning the café into a cinema and hinting at voyeurism/exhibitionism in the bather’s experience. In Composition with Tables and Chairs on a Beach (1983) the same effect contributes to the colour, grouped in sectors of cold tones (the blues of the tables and chairs) and warm tones (the ochres of the sand, the red and yellow of the other chairs) and to forced tension, which the artist presents as a difficult balancing act like that of a photographer who brings their lens into a setting of leisure and entertainment of others.

• Carlos Martín
• María José Alonso