‘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.

Gran Vía (1987) is different, and more closely linked to the fascination of the Madrid of his times in the 1980s. It is an example of a theme construed around urban life, with scenes of the main thoroughfares framed in a way reminiscent of the paintings of Edward Hopper’s, providing a different view of the city areas from that of the photographers of his generation (such as Francesc Català-Roca’s photos of Madrid’s Gran Vía in the period immediately after the Civil War). Under the glittering blend of déco and futurist architecture of the Capitol building (also known as the Carrió building, built on Plaza de Callao between 1931 and 1933), the characters and vehicles seen are aseptic, non-communicative and bereft of individuality as they play the role of automatons frozen in a puppet theatre. He thus expresses an interest in urban loneliness that contrasts with the ‘luxury, calm and voluptuousness’ of his works with coastal themes.

• Carlos Martín
• María José Alonso