La fascinante historia del cuadro sin fin

12/11/2021

WEAVING AND UNWEAVING CREATION

In the artist´s studio, life piles up between walls splattered with paint, floors crammed with paper and cardboard, shelves and tables with half-started sketches and others apparently finished, brushes, pencils, scissors... There the smells of glue, turpentine or oils mark the time of the work, they are like the clepsydra that gives the measure of the execution process in which a creation always seems unfinished, as if waiting for the unpredictable dominion of chance that will definitively propose the expected outcome. It is in this territory of intimacy that the most important and surely also the most painful part takes place, those beginnings that turn out to manifest themselves without being called: a colour, a simple piece of paper or a line drawn in the air, any stimulus to stop contemplating that blank space so feared by painters. Beginnings are always delightful", said Goethe, adding that the starting point, which he called the threshold of creation, "is the place of expectation". From then on, anything can be.

In the very process of Sebas Anxo´s work is the essence or foundation for understanding that a piece changes from one day to the next, that it progresses or regresses, in short, that it lengthens the final moment of finishing, that trance that is sometimes longed for but never seems to arrive. In Balzac´s story, for Frenhofer it is an agony that confuses him, making even the elementary pillars of reason totter. Ten years working on a canvas in which both François Porbus and Nicolas Pousin, the other protagonists of the novel, fail to see anything. The end of the work ends with the painter´s own death. The French writer used the narrative plot as a pretext to point out the dilemma that arose at the end of the 19th century regarding the modernity of painting. The old protagonist of The Unknown Masterpiece reacts to the weight of conservative aesthetics when he forcefully states that the task of art is not to copy nature, but to gloss it like a poet.

When can a work be said to be totally finished? Perhaps, as a large part of aesthetic theory affirms, only when the result that comes out of the workshop is observed by other gazes outside the creator himself or herself. But, while that moment does not happen, it is in the development of the procedure that paths are discovered which, little by little, join the party, contributing with new shapes that will complete the profile of the definitive image. A small and simple material revulsive can give rise to that unexpected scene in which unusual or even strange elements merge with each other, which will make strange friends on the support.

Sebas Anxo´s career has always been linked to paper and scissors, but also to painting. There is no surface created in which his presence is not evident through the spontaneous dripping that splashes the surface with an unpredictable dripping, freeing the painting from its traditional rigidity. It is possible to affirm that in these compositions he breaks with the aspect of involution by projecting himself with an expressive dimension, which, without losing the figurative breath, opens up to abstract informalist interpretations. This confirms that, like Balzac´s tormented character, Sebas "is not a vile copyist" of reality.

The strategy of exploring by combining paper with painting historiographically takes us back to Matisse´s last period, when the French painter made worlds of colours multiplied with loose fragments of paper or cardboard at home, sometimes from his own bed. For the Galician artist, Miró´s collage work is also a model, with which he coincides in grouping cuttings together, often leaving the edges open, free of any formal limits.

There are, then, concurrences with the Fauvist work and also with that which the Catalan experimented with in the 1930s, such as the use of cut-up material that is assembled as the stories operate in the spatial sphere of the work, a process in which the author dismantles until the components are completely dismantled and then put back together again. In this destructive character, Walter Benjamin saw "nothing lasting", "but, he said, for that very reason, it discovers paths everywhere". Cutting, cutting, placing, repositioning, gluing, painting... and letting introspection and chance keep the balance in this dynamic action. All in all, his production, while revisiting aspects of the history of art of the early 20th century, manifests in other scales of values, less attached to technique and more to the conceptual order, a certain closeness to authors such as Chagall, De Kooning, Klee or Basquiat.

A fascinante historia do cadro sen fin is the story of his painting, of a work that has evolved until it has found a personal space, sketched by models of a reality that surrounds him and that the artist sections until he achieves multiform and multicoloured pieces, creations in which figurative profiles are confused with numbers, letters, single words and the vitality of painting. Sebas Anxo´s compositions are conceived as in that basement of the Aleph that Borges designed among alchemists and cabalists, a multum in parvo in which there is room for everything from beings metamorphosed into plants or animals transformed into imaginary creatures. In this fantastic exercise, which transcends through different oneiric realities, surrealism acquires a certain air of magical causality.

Jean Genet was a frequent visitor to Giacometti´s studio; in fact, he was so enthusiastic about it that he acted as an excited notary of what he saw there and of what the artist himself told him. It was the place of recollection in which the master silently created those slender figures, of a spiritual elegance that moved. An intimate territory where the painful moment of beginning began again and again. The playwright recounted how he found under a table, under the dust of the room, "the most beautiful sculpture by Giacometti (...) Any absent-minded visitor could have broken it with his foot, he said". To their astonishment, the sculptor replied: "If it is really strong, it will be seen. Even if he hides it. The anecdote is told in a wonderfully well-seasoned way by the historian Ángel González García.

Sebas Anxo´s plastic language is totalised, starting from a specific field of action which is also his own workshop with "walls splattered with paint, floors crammed with paper and cardboard, shelves and tables with half-started sketches and others apparently finished, brushes, pencils, scissors.... "Here the process begins, here the work grows, here the creation is woven and unwoven, filled with small embers of life that will undoubtedly be revealed at a turning point to the gaze of those who, definitively, will end up concluding the work: the spectator.

Mercedes Rozas. Curator and art critic.