When at the end of the 1980s, Spanish painting began to decline and cool off after the enthusiasm throughout that decade, artists such as Patricio Cabrera started to breathe new life into landscapes and still-lifes from a non-strictly academic approach. The unexplored landscape, the terra incognita of the old mapmakers, was the space in which Cabrera’s early work moved, seeking the effect of non-dogmatic abstraction inspired by the decorative and arabesque. This aspect can be seen in these four drawings, where the ornamental motifs ultimately lose their direct reference to become a decorative repertoire of unknown origin, like the Islamic and Mudéjar art to which the artist had been exposed in Seville. In an attempt to circumvent the abstract and the figurative, Cabrera also drew on early surrealism. His interest lies in the biomorphic, the visceral and the legendary, veiled by an ethereal space taken to be a magnetic field in which figures evolve that are impossible to identify using known taxonomies, all of which lie somewhere between the sensual, the monstrous and the mechanical. In this vein, Cabrera also plays with transparency and suggests the possibility of coexistence of different levels of reality by means of the broad reserves left visible by the medium of paper. As Santiago B. Olmo has said about Cabrera: ‘Even though landscape was to be one of the cornerstones of his work, this artist addresses the ornamental and the decorative with a conscious absence of defined style, which provides his painting with an extraordinary capacity to generate images. In recent years, the fusion of the abstract and the figurative has provided his work with an extraordinary versatility’.

Carlos Martín