EL SÍMBOLO HA MUERTO

ILLUSTRATION

Watercolor, acrylic with airbrush and oil on paper.

Painted surface 22 x 36.3 cm ( 8.66 x 14.29 in. ) in a format of 36 x 50 cm. ( 14.17 x 19.68 in. )

Year of realization 1994

Signed on bottom right of the piece.

Unpublished illustration posed as a possible cover of the author's book Secrets.

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)

Mixing love with war, beauty with risk, seduction with challenge, passion with death, makes for a poison as sweet as it is explosive.

Luis Royo