ESTADOS COMPLEMENTARIOS 2005-2006

PAINTING SET FREE AND FREEDOM IN THE PAINTING OF PABLO REY

Arnau Puig. Philosopher and art critic.

Why are we moved by painting, if we who find ourselves before a work of art have already
discovered the natural world of colours ranging from the violet hues of dawn on to the dark
blues of the evening sky? Perhaps because painting, in the hands of one who is truly aware,
can become a weapon in the struggle to overcome the transience of our natural perception
and with it express ourselves, declare our loyalties, show the changes, enmities,
imperturbability and torments. I dont know if this could be a justification for the existence of
painters, but undoubtedly they are here because after centuries of painting about
confrontations or events, now they have begun to believe that they can show us colours
without it being necessary for them to be something or belong to something, but just as
weapons to be used in a struggle in which they are at the same time the essence of that to
which they refer and also just what they are themselves. Colours make human sensibility a real
and present value.
After this preamble which has served to show colours as being real entities in their own right,
alive and autonomous, I would like to talk about the work of Velzquez and contradict what his
most ardent critics have said about him: to say that he is far from being a pedantic realist, and
even less the idealist which Carducho has criticized him for being, (both characterizations only
serving to disguise in words and illustrate in colour the banal and accommodating reality of the
time). Velzquez was just a painter who needed to paint; but he couldnt do without a model,
within the range of possibilities resulting from the application of paint to canvas this
suppression of the model didnt even enter his head. Velzquez perceived that anxiety springs
out of a dark, indefinite amorphousness and from which appears the need for colour, which
give shape and form to what nestles in the consciousness and unconsciousness of us all. He
was one of the most successful proponents of the concept of colours as an objective reality,
that allowed those with the urge to paint, to make use of them, without any other justification.
This has been an almost essential preamble before we come to discuss the work of this born
painter that is Pablo Rey. The allusion to Velzquez has its rationale in that, as a human being,
Pablo Rey has been for some time subject to experiencing colour in a certain way, as
atmospheric vibration, something also attributed to Velzquez. Finally, however, he realized
that for a painter, colour has no other value than that of its presence; and that the rest comes,
originates from, the intention and necessity inherent in the process to which it is subjected. So,
painting consists of planting the colour which has grown inside oneself and appears in the
space on the canvas for who knows what reason, immediately, to be subdued, so that it can
answer to the reason why, between the colour and the artist, such a meeting took place.
Just like Velzquez as seen in his work -, Pablo Rey is quite impulsive, but also like the
painter from Seville there is, in the work of our contemporary artist, quite a carefully thought
out approach. The colours on the canvas can, and invariable do have a propensity to arrange
themselves; this has been called pictorial and consists in the harmonies within the picture
arising out of the contrasts. This natural arrangement has to be avoided if we want the work
to be objective, it is compelling as a work of art not for what it says but for how it is painted.
Only in this way is it possible for the colours to enter another internal dialogue, which make
them belligerent to the point of requiring the intervention of the artist. In a painting there

should only be two elements present: the paint, as colour, whichever, and the evidence of
time, the length of time which that patch of colour has needed to establish itself on the picture
plane in function of and according to the express intentions of the artist. In these brushstrokes
there should also be imbedded, line and colour and both absorbed and annulled the notion of
a light source as a generation of chromaticity and shape, which would be improper of a
modern concept of colour.
In the case of Pablo Rey time should not be confused with gesture, but responds instead to the
individual demands of each brushstroke, either fast or slow depending on the energy needs of
each, applied economically, with the colour imposing its will in any given moment or context,
leaving aside the technique used, be it oil, acrylic, ink or whatever. Dispassionate and active in
each and every one of the chromatic elements present or in the linear incisions, a distinction
which should only allude to the ample physicality of the colour present. Because painting
becomes, in this first phase of the pictorial work of Pablo Rey, something which is not born as
an internal obligation the less conscious the better, psychology should be avoided so as to
make neither dramatic nor comic (expressionism) that whose presence is only needed as
colour but as painting that asserts itself as the simple presence of colours on a flat surface.
In the making of the picture, in the process, at the same time as the artist attends to the
demands of the colours that appear in the space, the exterior reality that envelope it also
affects him and intervene, with or without his acquiescence, distorting a colour or chromatic
field, since whoever is painting, or uses the colours, is a being who feels and is affected by
what happens around them. The picture is absolutely free, growing from and for itself, but
needing in this in progress that someone, the artist, helps it develop and, in so doing, the
imponderables intervene which appear in the work. Suddenly the artist realizes that that
emanation of colours doesnt only show off the work, which is the essential thing, but also
speaks of the world, in the way each has of feeling and understanding it. Seeing the picture,
each of us gives priority to our own conflict. That chromatic freedom to which Velzquez was
progressing, now, in our time, finds itself once again in jeopardy, because colours refuse to
stay anymore on their support. But one thing was the old figurative restriction and quite
another the new way of seeing the world of whoever makes the work or observes it and in so
doing imposes their presence and their personality.
As a result of this each picture is different, each piece obeys its own circumstance, not only
that of the artist but also that of whoever stands unprejudiceded before the painted space.
These painted spaces the great innovation contributed by informalism describe whoever
looks at them: what they talk about is what there is inside whoever is doing the observing.
The artist has given the name of this current series as Estados complementarios, giving the
impression of a struggle which in each work is forged by the sole presence of the colours and
before and by whom they are being observed. I must confess, because of this circumstance,
some of my projections before this work: in that which is titled Estados complementarios 020,
I glimpsed the same amiable severity which Velzquez gave his portrait of Inocencio X; in this
picture, the colours which have been set free by the artist, have arranged themselves into two
large areas, that of the reds and that of the whites, in a way which is determined by the
subject, and if the artist has fought and one can see this in each of the brushstrokes the
perceptual culture of the time has ended up imposing itself in the same way as the prejudice
of the artist himself transformed the reputed affability of his eminence portrayed in the work.
In my attempted representation of the present work, those very same colours have found
their freedom, they have positioned themselves where they want to be, even while

maintaining an ongoing struggle against the will of the artist, which exercises its control in
keeping alive a magnificent vigour (like in the painting of Velzquez, but is now, is without
prejudice, and is free). The other piece is number 017; I have leaned toward La fragua de
Vulcano, though it could equally refer to Menipo; the saffron yellows have inclined me
towards it. Perhaps in the work of Rey there are more blues than in that of Velzquez, though I
believe this is due more than anything to the careless nature of time which has diminished it.
But the atmospheric colour of the background and the simplified treatment of the human
forms are the same as that which has been created by the current artist; with the distinct
advantage that our painter has been able to express the idea in pictorial terms and not just as
a story which had to be told or as a pretext to allow the artists to express themselves. Rey is
now able to confront the colours and show them as they are, organized by themselves, and at
the same time respecting the creative will of the artist. Seeing, feeling and contemplating;
herein lies the essence of painting.