DEATH OF THE FIFTH SUN

ILLUSTRATION

Watercolor, acrylic with airbrush and oil on paper.

Painted surface 64 x 48 cm (25.2 x 18.9 in ) in a format of 76 x 60 cm (29.92 x 23.62 in)

Year of realization 1988

Signed on the bottom right of the piece.

Cover for the novel "Death of the Fifth Sun" by the writer Robert Somerlott, by Tor Books (USA).

Published on the inside of the author's book Women, page 70. Edited in different languages and distributed internationally.


Painting has always seemed torn between an inward and an outward gaze: between vision and perception, between our dreams and the concrete, highly politicized conditions framing our comprehension of the world and what it might become. Today is no different. After a period in which the medium has been dominated by process-based abstraction, the figure – and representation with it – is ascendant again. But, if the 1990s and 2000s saw artists such as John Currin distorting classical form while others, following Gerhard Richter, mimicked photography, today’s figuration displays a distinctly different character. Gone, for the most part, are the echoes of old masters; gone, too, are the blurs of photorealism. What takes their place, instead, is a highly idiosyncratic approach filtered through pronounced affect, comic-book and sci-fi aesthetics, dreamy narratives and an eagerness to engage with our political moment without forfeiting the sensuousness of the medium.
David Geers (Sotheby's)

Adventure can have tiny feet, so it can walk stealthily. It can be ugly and strike panic into the heart, it can even have foul breath, but it never has tiny lungs. Adventure needs a big rib cage and the ability to blow hard, because adventure, above all, is about breath. At times an icy breeze, at others a warm, balmy wind. But always a breath of fresh air. With no lungs, or with lungs that can't take a deep breath, adventure can't move. And an adventure that can't move becomes boring.

Luis Royo