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

Collection

Pintura 352 [Painting 352]

Image caption
LUIS FEITO

Pintura 352 [Painting 352]

  • 1962
  • Oil paint and filler on canvas
  • 130 x 162 cm
  • Cat. P_392
  • Acquired in 1988
By:
Frederic Montornés

The uniqueness of Luis Feito's work lies in the unique, spiritual dimension that pervades it. Although he started out from a tradition based on figurative art, he soon shifted towards informalist abstraction, influenced by automatism, the vigour of gesture, the absence of premeditation and, above all, advocacy of a meditative emotional attitude aimed at stirring up the foundations of a form of art that was anchored in the past and unconnected to the European cutting-edge. With this in mind, he founded the El Paso group in 1957: a motley band of artists who called for greater, more aggressive expressiveness, a reduction in colour and a commitment to modernism by making art a form of life consistent with the concerns of the time.

Feito admired Kazimir Malévich and Mark Rothko, but also loved the harshness of the Castilian landscape, the spiritual poetry of the Baroque, St. John of the Cross and the power of oriental art. He strove to attain the essence of form through a sense of the purely mystical and a technique characterised by the use of sand in his oil paintings when he felt the need to create forms and spaces.

In Painting 107 (1958), Feito presents a simplified composition with circular shapes set against a calm, open background. Painted in 1958 using a dark, earthy palette of colours dominated by black, this matterist work is true to the artist's belief that every picture must be understood as a link in a continuous process of testing or as the result of the immediacy of a gesture that comes from his gut and is materialised through his hand to certify what he alone believes should be, i.e., a presence that simply exists.

Red predominates in Painting 352, produced in 1962, in an eloquent simplification of form and the power of an energetic gesture full of life. An outstanding feature is the two black strips, like perpendicular rivers of asphalt, that shift the chaotic tension essential in a work with oriental influences towards the bottom left of the painting. Painting 352 maintains the austere surfaces and strong emotional character of an image that can be seen as a good example of the balance that underlies Feito's work from his beginnings, as an artist dedicated to creating works focused on the utmost abstraction, with no external references.

Frederic Montornés

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Luis Feito
Madrid 1929 - Rascafría (Madrid) 2021

Luis Feito was a pioneer of abstraction in Spanish painting in the early 1950s and a founder member of the informalist-style El Paso group in 1957. In 1950 he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Two years later his career as an artist began with a series of works which use linear, figurative motifs that gradually lose touch with reality and turn into games of space on backgrounds in diffuse colours. In 1956 he moved to Paris, where matter became the focus of his work, with magma-like areas blooming from the background of his pictures in blurred corpuscles where light bursts out from the interior of the picture through contrasting blacks, whites, reds, browns and yellows, in works that were entirely informalist. In the 1960s he further developed this style, with a tendency towards simplification in form and material, using predominantly circular motifs. He moved from Paris to Montreal and then to New York in the early 1980s. This marked the start of a new period, with works organised around a web of labyrinthine linear motifs which are oriental in inspiration, after the fashion of mandalas, gradually invaded by crystallised forms. In the decades that followed he returned to a gestural style in equilibrium with geometric brush-strokes in black which he superimposed or interleaved with gestural elements influenced by Japanese calligraphy.

His work has enjoyed a high international profile ever since his first solo exhibition in 1954. He took part in the Venice Biennale in 1960, where he won the David E. Bright Prize. In that same year he was selected for the New Spanish Painting and Sculpture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1960). Anthologies of his works were subsequently staged at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (1988) and the Reina Sofía (2002), both in Madrid. His many awards and recognitions include his appointment as an Officier de l´Ordre des Arts et des Lettres ['Officer of the Order of the Arts and Letters'] of France in 1985, Spain's Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 1998 and admission to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, also in 1998. In 2000 he won the Award of the Spanish Association of Art Critics and in 2014 the 22nd National Etching Award.

Roberto Díaz

 
«VII Bienal de São Paulo. Spanish Pavillion», Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo, 1963). «Feito», Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo (Madrid, 1988). «20 Contemporary Spanish Painters in the Banco de España Collection», Sala de Exposiciones de la Estación Marítima Xunta de Galicia (La Coruña, 1990). «20 Contemporary Spanish Painters in the Banco de España Collection», Palacio del Almudí (Murcia, 1990). «20 Contemporary Spanish Painters in the Banco de España Collection», Sala Amós Salvador (Logroño, 1990). «20 Contemporary Spanish Painters in the Banco de España Collection», Museo de Navarra (Pamplona/Iruña, 1990-1991). «Vuelta al revés del revés. España en la Bienal de São Paulo», Centro Niemeyer (Avilés, 2022).
Vv.Aa. vii bienal de são paulo, São Paulo, Bienal de São Paulo, 1963, p. 210. Fernando Huici Feito, Madrid, Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo, 1988. Vv.Aa. 20 pintores españoles contemporáneos en la colección del Banco de España, Madrid, Banco de España, 1990. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2. Carlos Cuadros and Genoveva Tusell Vuelta al revés del revés. España en la Bienal de São Paulo, Avilés, Centro Niemeyer, 2022, p. 56, 198.