Seen next to the corner of a sofa is a table on which various objects are resting. These include a pair of glass fishbowls through which the prongs of two metal forks and a piece of a playing card with the ace of clubs can be seen, a spherical form and a few papers. Between the corner of the sofa and the table, a nebulous object with a cylindrical base and pointed top is discerned, though it is hard to identify. The tabletop has sinuous forms, and its base is barely insinuated, as though it had hardly any support. The composition is organised around two very marked diagonals, and is notable for its boldly decentred framing of the subject, with the objects strongly outlined and the table reaching forward onto the picture plane, all of which endows the scene with a restless severity. The paint is thick, the strokes are deliberately evident, and the transparent objects allow for an interplay of refractions and transparencies that is frequent in the still lifes of Pancho Cossío, a genre he frequented assiduously throughout his artistic career, and in which the influence of late Cubism is palpable. Distinguishable on the darkest areas are small white dots that help to add a peculiar spatial ambiguity to the scene, as though he were using them to accentuate the presence and the reality of the picture surface between the image and the eye of the viewer. This white speckling is very characteristic of some phases in Cossío’s painting. The ochre and brown tones stand out among the measured colouring of this oil. Also recognisable in this Still Life with Ace of Clubs is another of the constants of his style, the insistent application of glazes and transparencies.

Pancho Cossío painted this canvas in 1955, a moment in his career when he was already consolidated as one of the leading representatives of the new art, the modality of Spanish art in the first half of the twentieth century that fell between the avantgarde and the modernist. He was one of the foremost painters of the Paris School, a set of artists who were specially impacted by a journey or sojourn in the capital of the twentiethcentury artistic avant-gardes. Its representatives were apt to combine the reception of the languages of the first avant-gardes, fundamentally advanced Cubism, with the need for a return to order or tradition that arose in modernist art after the First World War. Together with Bores, Cossío is one of the chief exponents of a modality of this school indebted to the second phase of Cubism and known as “lyrical figuration”. In the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, he and others like Bores himself had formed part of a group championed by the magazine Cahiers d’Art and the critic Tériade, who saw them as one of the most fertile ways to restore vitality to the hesitant paths modernist art was following at that moment. The type of figures to be appreciated in this still life, which give the impression of being on the point of dilution in a dense magma of material with a highly characteristic reduced palette, had been one of the keys to his Parisian painting. His meeting with Juan Gris at that time appears to have been decisive for his choice of a painting which, in his view, ought to tend towards flatness without forgetting its reference to real objects, as is frequent in most of his still lifes. Hence, in all probability, his tendency to work on the effects of refraction of objects, which was to give rise to his personal “inventory of deformations” and the evanescence of the subject, which affects the nebulous identity of some of them. Also palpable in this picture is the attention paid to the “pictorial matter”, and the possible influence of the discourse on this subject that had been spearheaded by Giorgio de Chirico. In the last decades of his artistic career, this led Cossío to a painstaking use of traditional pictorial techniques, going so far as to make his own colours by hand.

Maite Méndez Baiges

This work was painted during the years when the artist was gradually diffusing form into matter, colour and light, on the way towards the accentuation of the play of mystery and illusion that characterises his later work. The painting shows the end of a sofa and hints at several objects placed on a table, which seems to hang in the air as if defying the law of gravity. There are two fish bowls, and through the one nearer to the spectator an ace of clubs playing card and the end of a fork can be seen. Another fork can just about be seen through the other bowl. There is a sphere between, and the picture is completed by some papers and an unrecognisable shape at the left-hand end of the table.

Cossio often made use of transparency and ambiguity, but the complexity of the composition here, with its two clearly defined diagonals, frames a brilliantly resolved layout that stands somewhere between severity and disquiet. The work shows clear late influences of synthetic cubism, not just in the juxtaposition of simultaneous planes but also in the use of everyday objects, with each element seeming to hold some arcane meaning over and above its mere presence. The apparent monotony of the ochre and tarnished brown colour scheme conceals some extremely rich modulations in other hues, all of which reinforce the intentional visual confusion sought by Cossío.

• Julián Gállego Serrano
• María José Alonso
• Carlos Martín