PAINTINGS

Rafael Pérez-Madero

It is difficult to talk about the work of Fernando Zóbel without mentioning the many activities he carried out throughout his life, as well as the many circumstances that coincided in his person. A Spanish painter born in the Philippines, who studied high school in Spain, Switzerland and the Philippines, and received a degree and doctorate in Philosophy and Literature at Harvard University with the qualification of magna cum laude. An impenitent traveler between Europe, America and the East, Zóbel had a clear vocation to create currents and unite cultures, in addition to the multiple facets that converged in his personality and were developed by him throughout his life: historian, patron, university professor, bibliophile, collector, creator and founder of the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca. All these activities were endowed with a great intellectual charge which shaped his extraordinary personality, and never meant a dispersion of the character, as could have happened, but all of them were united under the common denominator of his great vocation: painting.

All his impulses as a painter coexisted, in a perfect balance, with that intellectual education and those activities that marked his personality and, above all, his style, his own way of doing things; a harmony between the idea, the realization and the results that sealed all his projects. His continuous search for order and balance was directly projected in his paintings.

With all these antecedents, we find ourselves before an abstract painter, but with formal studies, a technique, procedures, and materials that make him conceive the work in a classical way:

“My process is classic; it is the process of sketch-drawing-sketch-sketch-painting. The sketch tries to remember an idea. The drawing tries to fix it. The sketch is a rehearsal of realization. It is a process of elimination, of eliminating distractions. The painting aims to be the clearest possible realization of the initial idea” (1).

Francisco Calvo Serraller, in his text for the catalog of the exhibition "Zóbel", organized by the March Foundation, immediately after the painter's death, summarized it very clearly:

“This simple scheme of pictorial composition, which apparently only reflects the mechanical application of an academic workshop method, encloses, however, all the complex wisdom that transformed the plastic arts into a humanistic discipline”.

There is evidently a work of reflection, research and method.

Naturally, and because of all this, it is also clear that Fernando Zóbel was a great draftsman, with a loose, fast stroke and an uncommon capacity for synthesis. His head was an authentic mental laboratory when it came to transforming the reality seen into that other reality of living and meaningful drawing.

The evocative and direct style of his painting does not let us see, sometimes, the intellectual elaboration work behind his work, but if we observe his drawings, we can see that there is nothing of improvisation or chance in his work. Everything is rehearsed, one and a thousand times, before reaching the canvas.

1949-1954

In 1949, after finishing his studies at Harvard, he decides to continue his studies in Boston, starting to work at the Graphic Arts Department of the Harvard College Library. At the same time and determined to receive serious painting and drawing classes (until this moment all his drawings and paintings obeyed a self-taught vocation and inclination), he gets in touch with local painters such as Reed Champion and Jim Pfeufer, who in the long run would become great friends. They also served to introduce him to the pictorial environment of Boston, where he also established a great friendship with the painter Hyman Bloom.

This stage of learning and study is one of the painter's most versatile periods. His continuous curiosity and his great sensitivity meant that the environment, circumstances, places and even people influenced his work in one way or another, changing styles and themes with great ease. Everything he learned and saw, he rehearsed again and again with different results. But even at this early stage, he already reflects his own style, his own personality.

It is not surprising, therefore, that during these years in Boston his painting was influenced by the so-called expressionism of the Boston School: landscape paintings based mainly on color, almost pure colors, with a very marked drawing. Very expressionist and strong works, but, on the other hand, full of lyricism, which already reflected the concern to find a more lively and open language of his own.

On his trips to the Philippines, and especially when he settled in Manila in 1952, his painting changed drastically. The environment and his surrounding continued to influence him and for some time he makes a whole series of drawings and paintings (mostly drawings) in which characters, places and customs of the time appear; somewhat ironic and with some social criticism, but with a great sense of humor, turning that criticism, even in the most satirical drawings, into a slight smile on the part of the viewer.

In this period, we find a series of works also influenced to a great extent by one of his favorite painters, Matisse. These works are very marked by drawing, colour and the play of relationships in space. Tracing the perspectives and at the same time breaking them with color, superimposing the planes in the painting and playing with what approaches and moves away within the work, these works show how Zóbel treats everything ambiguously, especially when he paints interiors with windows, granting the inside and the outside the same importance.

We can appreciate very clearly in these early stages of the painter, and despite his academic apprenticeship, the constant search for a newer, bolder and less rigid painting than the learned canons.

"SAETAS"

After discovering the paintings of Rothko, a work that definitively opens his doors towards abstraction, he witnesses the emergence of American informalism, showing great interest in the expressionist works of Pollock, Kooning, and Franz Kline. Zóbel enters a period of search, trial and error; trying to incorporate his work to the new and valid proposals of a painting without figuration.

Around 1957, he begins a series of works entitled "Saetas", in which he discovers and finds the path of his own language based on the speed and movement of the line and allowing himself to be influenced by oriental culture.

“Saetas series was inspired by Japanese sand gardens. All those meticulously drawn lines with the rake convey a disturbing effect” (*).

This oriental influence is clearly shown through line, space and gesture.

In gesturalism, we can also find references to Kline. However, Zóbel moves away from expressionist dramatism and bases his works on the nakedness of the line and the movement suggested through these strokes, which cross the space and intermingle in the painting. With this method, he achieves that vibrant and disturbing effect of Japanese gardens that at the same time make us feel calm and tranquility.

But if the line is important, as well as his abstract conception of painting, the technique he uses is no less so. And although Rothko never had a direct influence on his work, he did influence Zóbel intellectually when it came to conceiving a new way, a resounding possibility of making painting without figuration, and also - something that has gone almost unnoticed - he did have an influence in terms of the application of the technique. Observing the depth that the color spots acquired, those deep reds, the blacks full of silence, and that sometimes velvety finish that Rothko (1) achieved through layers and layers of paint. It is true that Rothko did not limit himself only to this type of technique but, under the same premises, he also investigated the materials for the preparation of his canvases, observing the different chromatic aspects that he could achieve.

Zóbel tried to apply this type of technique, but without clear results at first. Precisely in these colorful "Saetas" we can observe one or several layers of paint, which make the colors vibrate under the main or definitive color stain on which the lines run.

Over time, Zóbel mastered and perfected this technique of adding and superimposing layers of paint to achieve denser and deeper results, which is no less than the classic way of painting by glazes. Most of his later pictorial work is based on this classic technique. (1)

The Black Series (“Serie Negra”)

“After almost two years, I began to realize that my use of color was quite arbitrary (...). Any combination of two colors, as long as it had a certain vibration, could serve me. I think that for a work of art, what proofs not to be necessary is superfluous, even distracting, weakening and hindering. Little by little, I eliminated color until I was left with black strokes on a white background” (1)

We are specifically in 1959, the year in which Zóbel makes a turn in his work, finishing "Las Saetas" and beginning what we all recognize as "The Black Series". In this series, Zóbel does not limit himself to expression through naked lines that suggest movement and vibration and have only a very slight echo of his calligraphy.

In this new stage, continuing with his same methods and techniques, and using white as an expressive space within the painting, the imprint of his hand on the canvas is already evident. His own calligraphy gains more importance, and together with the sweeps of dry brush on the black lines, denser and more emphatic, the work acquires movement and speed (suggested speed and speed in execution), as well as direction, space, light and altogether volume and scale.

In Fernando Zóbel's painting, eminently mental, nothing arises randomly or by chance. From 1958 onwards, certain circumstances converge to bring about this change in his pictorial language. On the one hand, at the end of that year, he became more familiar with Spanish abstract informalism, the "El Paso" group and the expressionist painting, in black and white, which at that time was being done by artists such as Millares, Saura, Canogar and even Feito. On the other hand, he took part in a series of Chinese archaeological excavations in the Philippine peninsula of Calatagan, which increased and accentuated his interest in this culture and moved him to take again classes in oriental calligraphy, a discipline that he would soon teach through his chair of Oriental Art at the Ateneo de Manila University.

Zóbel assimilates these two facts, this new knowledge, rooted in two distant and different cultures, in a natural way. He discovers through Spanish informalism the possibilities of black and white painting, but he distances himself from the more dramatic and visceral expressionism that the aforementioned Millares, Saura, Canogar and Feito were doing at that time. He also incorporates gesture into his painting; not the informalist gesture, but the calligraphic gesture thought out, meditated, sought in space through movement and form, leaving the strokes of his hand on the canvas and that in some way may be related, by the technique and the use of space, with oriental calligraphy:

“I think that my relationship, as a painter, with oriental painting, although it exists, is not as important as people think. I see several reasons for this: having been born and lived in the Orient, having held a chair in Oriental Art History and my interest in all that; also because of the use of black on white (my paintings would have been less oriental to the critics if my strokes had been brown, blue or yellow) and also because of the use of a lot of white background to highlight a relatively small but very intense area of black graphics”.(3)

However, it is curious that after these experiences and cultural influences so distant from each other, he opted for black and white paint. In addition to movement (the suggested speed and the executed speed of the drawing), space and especially the calligraphic gesture begin to gain importance. From these years onwards, critics and historians begin to point out his influence and relationship with Oriental Art.

Perhaps Zóbel, having been very familiar with this art by having studied and taught it, was little aware of this possible imprint. But to Western eyes, this relationship was more evident. A relationship that is also evident in the contrast of opposite values and contradictory elements - black and white, stillness and speed, weightlessness and space - that somehow bring us closer to the philosophy of yin and yang. These contrary elements also complement each other, and in this search for that balance, Zóbel finds in this period of his work the maximum strength and expressiveness.

60s and 70s

From 1963, Zóbel feels again the need for color and enlarging his subject matter. This stage is at the beginning a little insecure and tentative, but supported by his own technique and method, in which he progressively incorporates scales and perspectives. At that time, he began to look at nature as a theme and as a pretext. In most of the paintings of this period, the landscape is imaginary, sifted again and again, until it becomes an idea, a memory of it, where a climate is established, an unreal space in which both the painter and the viewer can find their own sensation.

Towards the seventies, and already more familiar with the observation of the landscape, nature becomes the main axis of his work. Cuenca acquires a great protagonism (Zóbel was always very influenced by his environment), and his previous way of working also shows influence (series "Saetas" and series "Negra"). These themes are developed through numerous canvases, drawings, and sketches, even photographs; until eventually ending in large paintings of his famous series "El Júcar", "La Vista", and "Las Orillas", all of them based on landscapes and places in Cuenca.

"El júcar"

If all these successions or cycles of paintings are based on the pure abstraction of nature, the painter is not always interested in the same things, nor does he see the landscape in the same way.

In the first of these series "El Júcar", Zóbel is attracted by the relations of water-vegetation-rhythms-spaces and the challenge of the abstract structuring of the landscape on the canvas. Reflections, lights and the affinity between the colors acquire great importance, as well as the linear lattices, which mark dimensions, perspectives and spaces.

Within this interrelation of colors, he makes us think again, in a more subtle way, of his oriental influences. He himself explains: "I believe that this influence is not felt in my work, (...), until we reach the series of El Júcar, and when it is felt, it is less noticeable by its appearance, than by a certain way of translating cold and warm to the pink-green range instead of using the western brown-gray formula". With this range of colors and the lyrical treatment of the fluvial theme, Zóbel shows us once again the oriental echo in his painting. This is even more accentuated in the series "Orillas".

"Orillas" (Shores)

If we make a leap forward in time, we place ourselves in the eighties. Whilst Zóbel returns to the same theme of the river, this time calling it "Orillas" (shores), in this new stage he opts, almost exclusively, for color. Everything is a chromatic sensation, there are hardly any drawings, wefts, or profiles. The volumes, compositions and movements of these paintings are achieved through the color of water and the observation of its continuous flow, with a minimum of resources and a more pronounced poetic sense.

In the seventies, Zóbel sought to incorporate the landscape into his own language through an imaginary structure. He painted lights and shadows and reflections. He evoked autumn or summer, and slightly suggested the landscape without any description as part of the composition. With the "Orillas", in the eighties, besides the color, it seems as if he only wanted to trap in his canvases the continuous flow of the river.

But between these two periods he continues working and investigating in his own painting through two other painting processes: "La Vista" and the "Serie Blanca".

"La Vista" (The View)

It is, perhaps, one of the most observed and analyzed themes. Not more or less worked than others, but more familiar and lived, as it is a landscape that was always in front of him, since it was the view that could be contemplated from the windows of his studio in Cuenca and where we can also observe great changes with respect to previous stages.

Zóbel again relies on nature, but with a very different look and we could say even more committed to his abstract conception of painting. In this new stage, the landscape begins to be a theme and not only a pretext. The composition of the paintings is directly related to that of the landscape itself. He leaves behind the river, the reflections and the relations of color, to enter this time in the stony and arboreal masses of the nature of Cuenca; synthesizing everything to the maximum, eliminating all the distraction that the landscape carries with it. In the works of this stage, we can clearly see the mental process and the painter's capacity for synthesis, converting the materiality of the rocks, the trees and the houses into a slight tremor on the canvas in which even the color disappears, only supported by the composition of the landscape reduced to its minimum expression.

One of the most didactic and clarifying texts of the development and elaboration of these works around "La Vista" was written by Jose Hierro on the occasion of the exhibition of this series at the Galeria Juana Mordó in Madrid:

We are in the realm of painting as a "mental thing", in the Platonic world of ideas. Zóbel finds the embryo of his work in nature. But he needs that raw material to lose its consistency, its geological elementality, to become a product of intelligence assisted by sensibility. The whole search consists in finding an essence that is the "objective correlate" of the landscape seen, seen again, traveled, dreamed.

Zobel acts with the serenity of a chemist who decomposes a substance into its simple elements, his ...., his reagents are in his mind. He deploys his tools of geometry so that the landscape is rearranged, subjected to secret golden numbers, turned into a ghost of itself. The search for the divine proportion is manifested through reticulated horizontal and vertical lines, sometimes oblique, that organize the golden and immaterial masses in which the initial reality will definitely become.

The final result is an unreal, metaphorical and lyrical picture achieved only through whites and grays. Giving entrance, in turn, in the mid-seventies, to another of his famous series: La Serie Blanca (The White Series).

"Serie blanca" (White Series)

It is not a matter of abandoning color to paint in black and white, it is a matter of gradually reducing the color until there is nothing left but warm grays and cold grays.

This new twist that Zóbel gives to his painting sharpens the mental process of which it is necessary to speak continuously. His painting, if possible, becomes more schematic and analytical. White paintings with the vibrations of grays and blacks. Paintings more naked and without any color support. Without color but with light. Without time but with space. Without structures, almost without supports but in a perfect balance between black and white. This time it is not a theme that is worked to exhaustion, as in previous cycles. The theme is even broader, using more subjects to be based on, landscapes, still lifes, gestures, movements, lights, contrasts, etc., although this is only an anecdote of which there is hardly any trace left. This time, it is a matter of achieving the maximum with the minimum of resources. They are emotional paintings, but they lack the romanticism of the sixties and later; on the other hand, we can observe how, in this series of paintings, harmony, tranquility and order in his painting are totally evident:

My painting has always been calm. I look for order in everything that surrounds me. In order, in the broadest sense of the word, I seek the reason for beauty. I was impressed, long ago, that in the Japanese language a single word meant clean and beautiful.

Dialogues with Painting

If there is one theme that Fernando Zóbel never abandons, throughout his life, it is the Dialogues with Painting. As he himself said: I am a person who spent my life between books and museums. His environment, as we have already mentioned on several occasions, constantly influenced his sensitivity. He walked around museums all over the world with his sketchbooks, his pencils, and his Indian ink pens, taking notes and making interpretations of the works of other painters. A culturalist painting, as Antonio Bonet Correa once defined it. Studies, drawings and sketches, which almost always ended in a painting. In these works, Zóbel reveals to us the keys of what interests him at each moment and of each painter. Sometimes they are total compositions, sometimes fragments or details of a particular work, in all of them he reflects the atmosphere of the painting to be studied, always resolved in an abstract way, but with direct, more or less figurative hints of the subject matter.

One of the painters who most attracted his attention, and from the beginning, as we said before-, was Matisse. He recreates sometimes the apparently flat depth, with broken perspectives through strong colors that come to the foreground, creating an ambiguous space to the viewer's eyes.

But there are many authors that induce him to these dialogues: Degas and Manet in relation to color, Turner and Monet for the studies of color scale translated into scale of values, where through chromatism depth and volumes are achieved that complete the composition of the painting; Coorte, Vermeer and Saenredam for space, perspectives and geometric composition. The gesture and movement were studied through the Renaissance and Baroque: Barocci, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, etc. All the paintings resulting from these works are preceded, as is the case with all his work, by innumerable studies, sketches and drawings.

As an example, we have been able to gather some studies and sketches of the painting The Triumph of Caesar, based on the works with the same title made at the time by Mantegna and Rubens. Besides observing and studying the compositional elements based on geometries, as in the case of Mantegna, or the more nervous, colorful and full of movement of Rubens, there is an intention of spirit, a sensitivity to the subject that also gives us an opinion and a mood. Mantegna relies on geometric composition, based on circles and triangles, treating the subject in a ceremonious and solemn way with Caesar enthroned in his chariot, while Rubens, in his copy and interpretation of Mantegna's work, dispenses with the geometric and harder composition of the former to impose his style: meandering, nervous, full of color and joy. The Triumph, Rubens, turns it into a party.

Fernando Zóbel, in taking up this theme again, tries to create an ironic and distant atmosphere, totally opposed to Rubens' party, and with a reminder of Mantegna's geometric composition, giving us a somewhat sad and melancholic vision, picking up at the same time, on the right side of the painting and semi-deleted, a poem of the emperor Trajan written on his deathbed, the famous: Animula, vagula, blandula,

Little soul, soft, wandering

Guest and friend of the body

Where wilt thou now dwell

Pale, stiff, naked

Unable to play as before...?

According to Zóbel himself, he wanted to convey that melancholy of the past, where all the splendor of the Roman Empire has been reduced to its history and its own ruins:

Sadness and nostalgia, (...), everything is remote and cold. It is spoken, (in the painting), as one speaks of a deceased person, in the past tense, in a low voice and with a certain emotional respect. (4)

The 80's

Already, in these last years, Zóbel returns to color, but this time in a more emphatic and direct way.

We have talked about “Las Orillas”, around 1980, the series on the theme of the river belonging to this period, in comparison with previous moments. We have also highlighted the consequent change in the use of color, which he uses in a much more active way. The same thing happens in this last stage with the rest of his themes and his work. Everything acquires a greater chromatic vitality and in many of the cases the wefts, the profiles, and even the base drawings disappear; the whole composition and rhythm of the paintings are based only on the way of using the colors. Zóbel opens a new path in his painting, looser, more daring than in previous stages, with less ties and based on the interrelation of colors. A new and courageous way of approaching his work could be foreseen. Precisely, in 1984, he died in Rome, where he had gone to see an exhibition of Venetian painters to whom he was dedicating a series based on the study of color.

Through these different stages, we can observe the research to which Zóbel constantly subjected his body of work in a continuous dialogue with himself, in a forward and backward movement, or rather, "advancing in circles”, as Francisco Calvo Serraller would say. After a process of selection, an apparently evocative and intuitive painting is transformed into a mental and analytical painting, filtered of all spontaneity, where space is a field of action with an always necessary and imposed balance and color, or black and white is used with the same accuracy a poet would use words.