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 20^th 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 17^th-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