Es · En · De

Analysis and analysts

There was a time where when someone made an objection to a work of art and said, for example, that the painting was “beautiful”, though he did not say that it was good or bad, if what it was said was that it was “beautiful”, the meaning was that the viewer had liked it; and it is the viewer who in the end is the one that has to establish the dialogue with the work he is contemplating. For the purists and for the ones that go into greater detail of the ultimate meaning of words, the word “beautiful” bothered them and they were willing to hear that the work was good or bad, but never beautiful or ugly. Now, in the current century, and with so many analysis and analysts, and specially when we have to complicate matters, loop the loop, some want to deviate art from the universal understanding and enclose it in a kind of collectivism, always disastrous for the evaluation of art. This evaluation must always be fully personal and universal at the same time; it must not be subject to norms dictated by fashion or by what is “in” fashion.

Art, painting more specifically, has to become once again the expression of man and nature in an environment that only the artist can find in his interior. The painter must not stay in the wrapping. One can paint the very beautiful cover, but it will remain the cover of the instrument that resides inside, and that is what the artist must capture, the interior and… bring it out to light. Shapes are endless; thus, the ways of expressing them also are endless.

The painter cannot just be satisfied with a well composed work, the planes achieved and the academic norms fulfilled in perfection, because that is the mere wrapping of the work of art that has to be understood by elbowing its way with all these complements, and if these close the work to us, we have to disregard them and undress the work, making it to be born from the soul, from the artist’s instinct and not becoming, unintentionally an artisan of painting.


Jorge Rando, Dublin, September 2002