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winter in summer

2022-07-16T10:45:36.823Z


The paintings by Carlos García-Alix at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid offer a breath of icy air and stillness, a winter escape


More often than not, the shelter provided by the arts takes on a literal consistency.

In the torrid summer, in the dry and extreme heat of Madrid, animated with terrifying efficiency by the municipal custom of superfluous works, the paintings by Carlos García-Alix at the Círculo de Bellas Artes offer a breath of icy air and stillness, a winter escape.

In Paris, on a visit to a collector's house, Gian Lorenzo Bernini stared at some late landscapes by Poussin and, taking one down to bring it closer to a window and see it in a better light, made an extraordinary compliment: "What silence!"

I come from the heat, from the noise of traffic, from the cloudy air of carbon dioxide and desert dust, from the municipal ditches like trenches, from the warlike rattle of the drills.

Carlos García-Alix has always been a painter of distances.

Until now, he had mainly painted the distances of the history of the 20th century, using written visual documentation as the materials of an imagined memory, with an impossible commitment as a time machine, a camera obscura in whose interior the characters and places were projected. from the past, life-size photographs of ghosts, set in cafes and

art deco cinemas

.

García-Alix, who is an excellent portraitist, painted close-ups of writers marked by fire by the tragedies of the century, Pasternak, Baroja, Mandelstam, Simone Weil, in somber and earthy tones, and those portraits possessed a terrible immediacy of already mugshots. at the same time they expressed the remoteness of what happened many years ago, what was frozen and made irreversible by death.

Now García-Alix has chosen to paint the distance not of time, but of space.

It is an even more remote distance because there are very few geographical markers in it.

Here and there we recognize Nordic names, but there are details of architecture and urban landscapes - a bulbous dome, a dull yellow tram - that point to the east and not the north of Europe, and others of an absolute extraterritoriality, marked by the uniform and the bareness of the snowy landscapes, and the glimpsed silhouette of a long-distance truck traveling to or from Berlin on a highway.

This

Winter Journey

has something of a notebook and a personal diary, and it is also the adventure of the solo traveler of the

Winterreise

of Schubert, in that sequence of poems in which the confession of the intimate tear is illustrated as if with pictures from a story, from an illustration of an old fable: the road, the forest, the lost traveler, the isolated house among the trees, the light of a window seen from afar as a salvation when the night closes.

Winter is a school of stripping for a painter because it strips the forms and reduces the range of colors.

That is why it is such a suitable season for Carlos García-Alix, who exercises a sobriety of earthy tones that is often close to black and white photography, an austerity in the use of material that exposes the plot of the canvas and the lines of the preparatory drawings: at the ends of the branches of a tree, at the cables of a power line.

Reds that remind us of Munch's Nordic horizons appear in the glow of a sunset in a fjord.

In the backlight of the woods it is already dark night.

The snow and the cloudy sky turn blue at a certain time in the afternoon.

A clear frosty morning sky is reflected in the water of a stream about to freeze.

There are whites of birch bark, yellows of dry grass, ochres of earth and lichen.

In those moments I remember other winter landscapes, those of Andrew Wyeth.

One very cold morning in January I was walking through Central Park and I realized that I perceived the colors of winter much more accurately because I had trained myself by looking at them in Wyeth's paintings and watercolors.

The snow and the cloudy sky turn blue at a certain time in the afternoon.

A clear frosty morning sky is reflected in the water of a stream about to freeze.

There are whites of birch bark, yellows of dry grass, ochres of earth and lichen.

In those moments I remember other winter landscapes, those of Andrew Wyeth.

One very cold morning in January I was walking through Central Park and I realized that I perceived the colors of winter much more accurately because I had trained myself by looking at them in Wyeth's paintings and watercolors.

The snow and the cloudy sky turn blue at a certain time in the afternoon.

A clear frosty morning sky is reflected in the water of a stream about to freeze.

There are whites of birch bark, yellows of dry grass, ochres of earth and lichen.

In those moments I remember other winter landscapes, those of Andrew Wyeth.

One very cold morning in January I was walking through Central Park and I realized that I perceived the colors of winter much more accurately because I had trained myself by looking at them in Wyeth's paintings and watercolors.

In those moments I remember other winter landscapes, those of Andrew Wyeth.

One very cold morning in January I was walking through Central Park and I realized that I perceived the colors of winter much more accurately because I had trained myself by looking at them in Wyeth's paintings and watercolors.

In those moments I remember other winter landscapes, those of Andrew Wyeth.

One very cold morning in January I was walking through Central Park and I realized that I perceived the colors of winter much more accurately because I had trained myself by looking at them in Wyeth's paintings and watercolors.

From a distance, each landscape takes on a photo-realistic sharpness, a poetry of intermittent movie frames

One looks at the paintings in a double movement of proximity and nearness, of orderly sequence and fickle return.

In this silence I have all the time in the world: as if I appropriated in this visit all the time of Carlos García-Alix's boreal travels, of the other sedentary time in the workshop where the sketches took on a more secure form.

At a certain distance, each landscape acquires a sharpness of photographic realism, a poetry of intermittent frames of a film, the film of the traveler who enters those paths, who arrives at one of those solitary houses, who contemplates motionless the passage of the train , or who goes on that train and contemplates the landscape from a window, and sees a silhouette of someone anonymous outlined in the snow.

At a certain distance, the gaze surrenders to the illusionism of the painting,

to his extraordinary ability to create mirages of the real world.

It is up close when you notice the craft that sustains this joyous deception, when you see the effort, the technique, the skill of drawing and brushwork, the expressive economy, the rough weft of the canvas, the spaces left blank, the rushed, or unfinished appearance.

Carlos García-Alix is ​​a cultured painter, in the full sense of the word;

a painter with all the craftsmanship experience of the workshop and all the baggage of the history of painting, and the history of the last century, and literature, and music.

Everything is so mixed in his art like the pigments when the colors are ground in a mortar.

The solitary figure that appears from the side or from the back in some of his winter landscapes is the traveler of Schubert and Friedrich, and it is above all the painter facing astonished the task of representing the spectacle of the visible world and the secret of his own awareness.

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Source: elparis

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