María

María

  • 1981
  • Oil on canvas
  • 92 x 65 cm
  • Cat. P_767
  • Acquired in 2012
By:
Isabel Tejeda

The paintings by Alfonso Albacete in the Banco de España Collection date back to the early 1980s, a time when an emphasis on ‘painting for painting’s sake’ coincided with the heady transition to democracy after nearly forty years of dictatorship. Some artists whose career had started a decade earlier with painting steeped in conceptualism, among them Albacete, turned their backs on metalinguistic discourses to immerse themselves, almost hedonistically, in the pleasure of painting. They found the primary sources for their subjects, expression and visual delight in the Expressionist and Fauvist paintings of the early 20th century and in post World War II Abstract Expressionism. However, what the avant garde saw as free brushstrokes painted instinctively became rather a requirement in the painters of this generation. Alfonso Albacete’s work, in fact, combined the cerebral – fundamentally, the study of light and space – with painting expressing delight, but also reflection and restraint.

We find a return to the genres that emerged from the 17th-century French Academy, including still-lifes, landscapes and portraits. First Ulysses (Still Life with Lemons) (1981) is an interpretation stripped of any literary reference; in fact, it is the abstraction of the title: a luminous painting where white prevails, checked by a line in the upper part of the piece. That line seems to indicate the abstract idea of a tablecloth on which large pegs of different colours are arranged, like blots that seem to be fleeing from the painting. In this vein, it is the visual expression of his idea rather than a depiction of lemons, other fruits and objects. A thin coat of paint on this white plane casts a veil over faded layers of structures, as if they were regrets, and the work is splattered with long drips of paint running down like tears from the blocks of green, yellow and orange oil paint that top it like a mosaic frieze. These sought-after drips show it is paint and nothing more than paint. The lemons are undoubtedly a reference to his childhood and youth in La Alberca (Murcia), where he started out alongside Juan Bonafé, who was his teacher at that time. The artist’s travels around the Mediterranean were also highly influential (he particularly recalls how struck he was by the Bardo National Museum in Tunis), as he saw the sea as a series of waves/mirrors echoing each other.

Continuing with the use of genres as a pretext for painting, María (1981) is a portrait of his sister painted at his family home in La Alberca. Itbelongs to the Orchard series, in which Albacete painted several “portraits” of acquaintances who, almost as if staging a performance, walked nude among the lemon trees. Space is structured by brush-strokes that create the place of a body in the centre of the canvas, whose volume is crossed by rebellious splatters of colour.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Alfonso Albacete
Antequera (Malaga) 1950

Alfonso Albacete belongs to the generation of Spanish artists who revived the genre of painting in the 1970s and 1980s. He moved from his hometown to Murcia, where he learnt his trade with Juan Bonafé. He went on to study Architecture in Valencia and Madrid, and graduated in 1977. From 1979 onwards he worked full time on a series of paintings, starting with In the Studio, which was exhibited at the Egam Gallery in Madrid that same year, in which the influences of Paul Cézanne, Abstract Expressionism and North-American pop art could already be seen, and ending with Levante (1980), which captured the luminosity of the landscape of Murcia, and The Prague Student (1985), which depicts scenes from his travels through Central Europe. They all start from the everyday and progress though a figuration that becomes progressively more abstract. However, the figurative references never disappear entirely and the light and atmosphere are captured by a material, a bright colour range and a formal complex architecture that he continues to developed as a constant assertion of the pictorial genre.

Albacete took part in the exhibitions that set the course of Spanish art in the 1980s, such as ‘1980’ at the Juana Mordó Gallery (Madrid, 1979) and ‘Madrid D.F.’, at Madrid Municipal Museum (1980), and subsequently in later historical reviews of that time. In 1988, the first retrospective of his work was held at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. His work was also exhibited at the Moscow Modern Art Museum (2011), at the Andalusia Contemporary Art Centre (Seville, 2014), the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2014), and the Marlborough Gallery (Madrid, 2016).

Roberto Díaz

 
«La pintura inevitable», Centro Cultural Las Claras Fundación Cajamurcia (Murcia, 2024).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.