The first trip of the painter Félix de la Concha to the United States was in 1982. He arrived in Tampa Bay invited by an “American” whom he had met “while the guy made the Route del Quijote on horseback.” The artist took “one of those frightful flights of the time”, which cost him “35,000 pesetas”, won “making humor drawings in (the newspaper) Information ”. He landed in New York, took a Grayhound, and planted Florida’s “cruel” summer.
The past fall, in which the United States remained the same or more cruel, of the shell returned, 42 years later, to the state of the Sun, where he inaugurated, the day after Donald Trump’s victory, an exhibition in the Mouse Museum Museum. Until the end of this month, there shows the work he did on the commission of the institution to commemorate the centenary of the foundation of the city and the vision of Addison Mizner, the architect who wanted to create “the most important tourist enclave of the American continent”. The artist – who has been looking for a new meaning for the painting technique for decades in the open-air, Outdoor, oil on canvas of the Natural – chose the place from where Mizner began drawing the mouse plane: the crossing between the Dixie highway and the royal road with the yellow building where the urban planner installed his offices to the bottom.
In a video that accompanies the paintings in the museum ―which also exposes a version of De la Concha (León, 62 years) of Las Meninas A natural size made from a very high resolution reproduction that Google made of the painting – the painter is seen carrying the portable easel as a passer -by/extraterrestrial in the middle of the cars. It is his pertinazo – Llueva way, a scorching sun or snow – to do things, a way in which he has been trying to catch, corner to Rincón and with the spirit of a diarist, the soul of the United States, falls. Here it was installed in the late nineties after an childhood between León and Santander, the passage through the School of Fine Arts (where, he says fun, he has left to finish the race two subjects: “painting and painting of the landscape”) and some eighty in Madrid of the move, where his realism, applied to the landscapes and the people, was received with disdain by those who had “modern”.
That “snobbery,” he says, is still in force in Spain, “where there are still many people who put all realism, a sack that associates the caspose.” “And while there is a lot of caspose realism,” he admits, “not all realistic painting is.” He never cared for those criticisms of “those who do not know how to see.” “I always like to paint the natural, without retaking anything in the study, and first (at first). I am interested in the emotion of the moment, hunting for a moment that is not going to be repeated, ”explains the artist, about a diametrically opposite technique to the realist of the header of Spain, Antonio López: if he gloats in the process (and in the cultivation of his legend), of the shell jumps agile from a challenge to the next.
This was done in the late nineties for a year with the 32 views of a corner of Columbus (Ohio). This project followed the 365 perspectives, one per day, of the Cathedral of Learning, the Gothic skyscraper that dominates Pittsburgh, the city of Steel, of which the Homestead neighborhood has portrayed, and in which it also stopped, inside and out, in the native house of Henry Clay Frick, one of those industrialists and patron of the arts that forged the metallurgical and cultural past of the United States.
Although your most known project here may be Falling water and perspectiva, Oil series with the Cascade house, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, as the protagonist. He painted them between 2005 and 2006, by invitation of the organization that ensures the conservation of that milestone of the architecture of the twentieth century, which Lloyd Wright erected in the middle of the majestic nature of the west of Pennsylvania and on the course of a stream.
During those two years, he stayed for seasons on the other side of the road. He portrayed the house in the four stations inside and out, with a series of seven monumental visions from the foot of the cascade included. “They gave me freedom, with one condition: that the interiors always painted them after the last tourist had left or when the house was closed in winter. I spent many nights there, ”he explains of La Concha, who accepted the assignment as“ a challenge ”:“ How to translate from painting one of the most photographed icons of architecture? How to see it without the camera filter?
Almost 20 years later, the artist returned to the site of the crime, “already as a tourist.” “It is such a fascinating construction, that you always see new things.” So he asked to portray it again in 2022. It is not surprising that, once the shell had finished his second incursion, Justin W. Gunther, director of Fallingwater, told El País in an accomplice tone during a visit to the place that the artist “knows the house better than anyone; its beauty and also its problems. ” Gunther referred to the conviction, worthy of Sisyphus, to fight, from its construction in the thirties, against the corrosion of water in the concrete.
The painter’s next American stop was on the outskirts of Iowa City, where he lived five years. This time he set his attention on an “any farm”, of which he painted 75 views, while dedicating the rest of his time to the project of Las Meninas, A “natural size and artificial light” copy of Velázquez’s masterpiece. He made it raising a new search for truth through repetition, fragment to oil fragment over 140 23 X 30 centimeters. The project later had its reflection in a book: Las Meninas from an artificial light. Diario of a copy (Kingdom of Cordelia. With prologue by Jordi Gracia).
With the farm, his cutting was also imposed: he tied up for “the 25th rule.” “The set,” he clarifies, “is distributed in 25 views in the morning, and many others at noon and in the afternoon, 25 steps away from each other. And then, because in winter the temperatures dropped to 25 below zero, so it could not be more than 25 minutes in a row painting. ” The result was exposed in autumn in the Fernández-Brasso gallery, in Madrid, accompanied by a small catalog in which the critic and commissioner Armando Montesinos writes: “In his work (of the shell) investigates the physical reality of the painting while designing and displays the fiction of the representation. While, with perseverance and awareness of knowledge, it simulates that it only paints, of the shell inhabits that abyss between what was seen and the represented in which the mystery and beauty reside ”.
The Fernández-Brasso gallery this week takes 111 paintings of the latest of the shell, a project that has called Autistic painting diary. In it, the artist portrays the heterodox modes in which people parks in their Madrid neighborhood. What neighborhood? “Do not put it,” excuses himself. One of the enemies Of his “art of the moment” are, he says, those curious who come to ask what he is painting and why precisely that corner caught his attention, and not any other.