The conceptual dimension of Untitled (1992) combines mental and physical exercise with a free-form approach to the artistic process and invigorating styles and forms. Everyday items are expressed in a gestural, serial schematic way, thus playing with perception. A mahogany board seems to play with the positive and the negative of a square that is duplicated in the work. One is filled in and the other blank. The artist draws on ready-made items as minimalist, primary structures to which he brings a large dose of visual poetry.

His thinking is based on contemplation and reflection on everyday reality. The process always functions dynamically, even though it is slow, constant and dogged. It is closer to the work of a scientist than that of a theorist. This work is part of a radical change in his output that started in 1991. Starting from everyday items photographed in black and white (a coffee pot, a lamp, a fan), he plays at revelation and concealment based on specific fragmentations or manipulations. The space depends on and is subordinate to the object. Miguel Fernández-Cid called them ‘perfect contemporary still-lifes’. Fragmentation is used throughout as a resource; there is an eulogy to the elusive, to the poor, to the manual and to the lightweight in his works from that period. They are lacking in rhetoric and force the viewer to contemplate them stripped bare.

The L’Oreal Prize, which he won in that same year of 1992, enabled him to turn to new materials and begin to work with photography, and the Banesto Grant enabled him to embark with total freedom on what would be his last project: large works on mahogany. He first drew linear sections or circles. Then he used the wood itself as an expressive element via the colour of the varnish and formal reliefs. Small formats coexist with large pieces. These works evoke silence, rigour, eternity, as if aware that they are his last. This is confirmed by his use of a material as durable as mahogany for the first time in his output.

Beatriz Espejo