Xesús Vázquez

Xesús Vázquez begins his artistic work in the late sixties, but the true beginning of his pictorial project must be placed in the context of the late seventies and early eighties, that unrepeatable, euphoric moment in which the antecedents of the CAM Collection of Contemporary Art are chronologically situated.

Generationally, Xesús Vázquez does not fit with the youth of the most repeated names: Barceló, Sicilia, Broto, Uslé. Neither from a stylistic point of view does Vázquez drink from the neoexpressionist sources that proliferate in Europe and the United States. In fact, his sparse and serene painting clearly connects with postminimalism. As time goes by, the boundaries begin to blur, the limits between abstraction and figuration dissolve, poetry is introduced, the incorporation of words to the canvas surface, cultured literary references, precise, perfectly integrated into his pictorial work.

Xesús Vázquez appears to us today as a solitary figure in art, as someone who long ago renounced any collective program, but who remains radically immersed in his own discourse firmly anchored in painting: chromatic intensity, computer-assisted labyrinths, but later translated into the language—manual by definition—of painting. The pleasure, both retinal and mental, that we experience when confronting these patterns, these beautiful labyrinths through which our gaze glides, makes especially relevant a pictorial proposal that, under a most personal countercurrent, has managed to occupy a prominent place, radically its own, in the national plastic arts scene of these last twenty years.

Text provided by the Fundación Mediterráneo. Author: J. B. Peiró.