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

Collection

Ruta de San Mateo I [Route of St. Matthew I]

Image caption
GERARDO DELGADO

Ruta de San Mateo I [Route of St. Matthew I]

  • 2001
  • Acrylic on canvas
  • 185 x 140,5 cm
  • Cat. P_671
  • Acquired in 2002
By:
Frederic Montornés

Together with José Ramón Sierra, Juan Suárez, Pepe Soto and Manuel Salinas, among others, Gerardo Delgado is considered to be one of the artists who laid the foundations of that Sevillian abstraction that successfully shook up the more traditional movements that sought to perpetuate realism in the mid-1960s. After training as an architect, his interest shifted to the world of art and, even though the influence of Carmen Laffón’s work is very obvious in his early paintings, they progressively evolved, influenced by abstraction and dialogue with the public, by means of participatory, random and modular projects. After his time at the Madrid Computing Centre, where he reflected on the pictorial act by researching space and the possibilities of modifying it, in a line between Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Delgado returned to painting and developed what he called a non-formal space or counter-space. It is a concept of space based on the all over or aformal that is so present in the works of Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, which leads the artist to create enveloping spaces using installations of structured walls filtering light and colour.

Dating from two periods of stylistic research eleven years apart, The Walker – The Visionary (1990) and the Route of St. Matthew I (2001) are two good examples of the artist’s work on an understanding of space. In other words, the mix between the conscious and unconscious, which reveals the underlying threads behind a work like his The Walker – The Visionary diptych, not only enables him to combine independent parts in a single theme, but also to evoke unexpected courses in favour of spontaneity and the openness between their unions to the purer, more geometric and analytical abstraction of this Route of St. Matthew I. This is the key work in his Routes series, entailing the complete flooding of the painting by this geometric network which, acting as a featureless space, can be related to the figure in earlier works from the same series.

Frederic Montornés

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Gerardo Delgado
Olivares (Seville) 1942 - 2024

Gerardo Delgado was a leading light of Spanish abstract geometric pictorial art from the end of the 1960s. While he was studying at the Seville School of Architecture (1959-1967), Delgado experimented with painting that he resolutely evolved towards rational abstraction at the end of the decade and his modular works date from that period. They are based on simple, volumetric, geometric forms in plain colours that can be manipulated by the viewer. The result is a series of open pieces that can be combined in different ways, such as his Mural for the Mudapelo School (1968). These principles led him to take part in the Automatic Generation of Art Forms at the Computing Centre at the Complutense University of Madrid. During the 1970s, Delgado’s work focused on expanding the pictorial space and colour with installations comprising large pieces of fabric hanging from the ceiling. He later added sketchy drawings to them, for example in Painted Fabrics (1976). In the 1980s, gestural forms appeared in his drawings and the figurative act appeared on indefinite backgrounds and as an anchoring element with the real, as occurs in his In the White City series (1982-1985). Moreover, the objects he comes across are included as a further element of the pictorial. Since the end of the 1990s, Delgado has returned to geometric abstraction using grids to structure the paintings and playing with expanses of colour, for example in the Routes series, which he began in 1997.

Delgado was included in some major landmark exhibitions including the ‘New Generation’ at the Edurne Gallery (Madrid, 1967); a show at the Computing Centre (Madrid, 1970); and events such as the Pamplona Encounters (1972). Since his first solo show at La Pasarela Gallery (Seville, 1968), his work has regularly been exhibited in Spanish galleries and centres such as the Professional Association of Architects (Seville, 1984); the Seville Contemporary Art Museum (1993- 1994); the Bishops’ Palace Exhibition Rooms (Malaga, 1993- 94); Cadiz Museum (2001); Caja de Burgos Exhibition Venue (2003); the Damián Bayón Centre at the Institute of the Americas (Santa Fe, Granada, 2010- 2011); and the Andalusia Contemporary Art Centre (Seville, 2017).

Roberto Díaz

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.