"In painting, and I suspect, in almost everything, what is left over gets in the way. Every stripe, every color that is left over, interposes a kind of curtain between the painting and the spectator."
Cayón is pleased to present at our space in Manila (Philippines), Fernando Zóbel: The 1970s. A Homage to Rafael Pérez-Madero, an exhibition that, first and foremost, is a tribute to Rafael Pérez-Madero, the artist’s right-hand man since 1967, and the foremost expert on Zóbel’s pictorial work.
The project, which includes a catalog curated by Juan Manuel Bonet, explores Zóbel’s 1970s period, a decade of complete creative freedom marked by a highly personal style. This period represents the culmination of the artistic experiments Zóbel began in the 1950s, now stripped of everything he deemed unnecessary: ‘In the process of painting, I eliminate what is excess. My paintings, I believe, are quite simple—I don’t want anything in them that distracts.'”
From 1963 onwards, the painter, increasingly immersed in the idea of minimizing his surroundings, once again feels the need to look at nature as a theme, and also as a pretext, but this time, it would be in a schematic way.
In most of the paintings from this period, the landscape is imaginary, filtered over and over again, until it becomes pure concept, where a mood, an unreal space is established, in which both the painter and the viewer can find their own sensation.
Contrary to what is commonly believed, the 1970s were the years of greatest artistic exploration for Fernando Zóbel.
In this decade, more familiar with the observation of landscapes, nature becomes the central theme of his work, even if only as a pretext, as we mentioned earlier, and Cuenca – always influenced by his surroundings – takes on a significant role in his painting as he finds a new way to approach his work: his famous series, in which – simplifying – the entire body of Zóbel’s pictorial work has come to be structured and systematized, also for the creator’s own enjoyment, as seen in “El Júcar,” “La Vista,” “Las Orillas,” all of which are based on landscapes and settings from Cuenca.