I D E A S...

LIVING NATURE

"For a painter like me, obsessed with the composition and structure of my paintings, everything in painting works as in a still life. The authentic compositional challenge of every painting is that it “works” in all its elements; that each of its pieces mesh with precision and "breathe" with its adjacent ones and even form complex connections with remote areas of the painting, like intricate neural networks in continuous synapses. This hidden interconnection means that apparently poorly executed paintings have a mystery that sublimates us, a strange rhythm that does not we know where it comes from but it warns us that there is art beating in its clumsy or "ugly" seams. Many of these poorly made, ugly paintings are admirably coordinated inside, and no matter where we cut them, they continue to be saved as paintings. self-regenerating like the amputated tail of a lizard. That is why I am passionate about almost all artistic currents and in the same way I do not distinguish between themes or genres in painting. They all work the same. At the end of the day, they are all a still life, a living nature - never dead - where we arrange the elements to form a dynamic space that the viewer activates and makes breathe with their eyes through sensitive observation. A landscape is a still life; The sun, the clouds and the wide fields share and feed each other as do a bowl with the fruits it contains and the table that supports it. Even a portrait, if it is good, is governed by these hidden counterweights that give it life. Even Las Meninas by Velázquez would be like an extraordinary still life - ethereal and light in its sky, dense and heavy in its humanity - with deep and rich spaces that speak to each other following the compositional laws of the still life genre. A random cut in the sky of Las Meninas contains all of his art, maintains the nerve and cadence of the genius, his unmatched work, his trapped air; A single strand of Infanta Margarita's transparent hair is already worth a world, a world that speaks in perfect plastic synchrony with, for example, the dense and unctuous fur of the seated Great Dane in the painting. Here each part contains the whole, and, as in the scapulars and relics of the saints, from a tiny piece emanates all the grace, all its miraculous capacity. "
"An unmistakable sign of failure in a painting is the suffocating bloat between its parts. If there is no breathing between its fragments it will never be able to function or make the eye travel between the different stories and plots that it hides. The paralysis and fatigue of the eye is the death of all painting. When I paint, knowing all this, I always arrange my objects and my subjects as in a still life, working on a whole but with the care and effort to take care of the small, the imperceptible feature, the small living crack that diverts the path of the delicate drop that slides, like a tear, precisely drawing the orography of the pictorial layer. And I do it this way because I know that it depends on these small worlds that activate some plastic emotion in the viewer and the painting begins to work, from there, in all its machinery. Nothing more can desire all painting to exist: only being activated and initiated through the fluid and attentive observation of an unprejudiced viewer. The rest, thanks to the miracle of art, will work on its own." 

© José Manuel Merello