Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Leña. Serie C [Firewood. C Series]

Image caption
SANTIAGO SERRANO

Leña. Serie C [Firewood. C Series]

  • 2003
  • Digital print on manipulated paper. Diptych
  • 120 x 87,5 cm each
  • Cat. D_411
  • Acquired in 2004
By:
Isabel Tejeda

The Banco de España has a considerable number of paintings by Santiago Serrano (born in Toledo but now living in Madrid), with works dating from each of the four decades from the 1970s to the 2000s. The majority, however, are from one of the peak moments in his career, during the 1980s. In his recurrent use of the abstract path, a precedent to these pieces can be seen in his monumental untitled diptych from 1977, Untitled, coupled with other large-format paintings, such as the triptych Propac (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid). Serrano resolves abstraction, as a mode of knowledge, in plastic exercises, reverting in these paintings to the tradition of Greco-Latin mythology. He derived his profound knowledge of pictorial and graphic techniques precisely from his interest and research into materials and supports, which was linked to his work as a restorer.

Three paintings by Serrano were shown in the exhibition 'Imágenes de la abstracción' ['Images of Abstraction'], organised by Caja Madrid. These were Del amarillo [Of Yellow] painted in 1971, the triptych Propac, and a piece from the Banco de España Collection entitled Nona gris (1989). The latter is a giant clepsydra, with the subject taken out of the flat painting and leant against the diptych which rests on the wall and floor. The elegant palette of sombre tones used in this work is in line with his previous work.

Serrano's two pieces on paper in the collection, dating from 2003, retain the same plastic and personal identity. Here, however, he explores the unprecedented potential of digital media. In Firewood, Series C (2003), he investigates variations in photographs of pieces of wood, which he turns into gestures by intervening on the media with pigments and resins and then plotting them digitally.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Beatriz Espejo
Santiago Serrano
Toledo 1942

Santiago Serrano completed his primary studies at the Central Institute for Conservation and Restoration of Artworks (ICROA) in Madrid. He subsequently went on to join the ICROA as a technical conservator during 1968 and 1971. In 1968, he obtained a scholarship from the Juan March Foundation to travel to Paris to study at the Académie de Saint Louis. In the 1970s he established the key features of his art: austerity, a concern for materials and a compositional and chromatic simplicity. Critics such as Francisco Calvo Serraller have linked him to 'new abstraction', a trend in painting resulting from the crisis of the avant-garde and modernist ideas, manifested through a vision of painting as a territory of thought, or what Manolo Quejido would later call 'painted painting'. Serrano's work characteristically refuses to make any concession to naturalism and establishes its own austere language. At the heart of his art is a play between contradictory elements: full and empty, the body and its shadow, the spiritual and the material. His entire oeuvre is marked by two opposing tendencies: the search for an 'elusive' painting —visible from the 1970s on— and a tendency to enhance the dimension of the painting as an object, summarised in the idea of 'removing the painting from the wall'.

His first show was at the Galería Amadís (Madrid, 1971). Since then, his work has been exhibited at galleries such as Galería Fúcares (1979), Galería Egam (since 1983), Galería Soledad Lorenzo (1992) and Galería Juana Mordó (1994) in Madrid, at the Galería Joan Prats (Barcelona, 1988), and in institutions such as the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (Madrid, 1981); the Camón Aznar (Zaragoza, 2001); and the Városi Müvészeti (Györ, Hungary, 2003). His work can be found in some major collections, including among others the Museo Reina Sofía, the IVAM, the Patio Herreriano Museum, the National Library, the Museum of Abstract Art, the Juan March Foundation and the CAAM in Las Palmas. In 2017 he presented his latest work at the Carmen Conde Culture Centre (Majadahonda, Madrid). In 1996, he was awarded the National Engraving Prize for his research on graphic art.

Beatriz Espejo

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.