Abstraction is not the end of the painter’s journey, but a round-trip station. The artist’s concern and the eternal search of form and content makes him irremissibly reach abstraction, and once he is in that moment of his pictorial journey and after going through everything that he can offer from his interior, and from his perception, he has the need to come out again to the natural light of the real. With this I do not mean that what is abstract is unreal, but that the artist experiments what is real with his own internal feelings. The abstract is born with the work during the process of its creation.

That is why I doubt abstract painters that finish their lives painting in abstract, because in every abstraction there is, if not in the canvas, in the mind of the painter, a Realist painting. And that reality already assumed by the artist, from his interior, comes out with new shapes, presenting itself to the exterior with the variations the painter’s mind has wanted or has been able to perform. Because, in the end, it is only a transformation of the reality that is seen by the artist in a given way and at a given moment. Each abstract painting is born from a real idea, one cannot paint abstract of the abstract, and it is rather a consequence of the evolution of the painter starting from a real base and from a personal experience. I believe that any painter will at some moment in time reach abstraction, and if he does not reflect it on the canvas, he will at least have it drawn in his mind and these will be his demons, always accompanying him until he frees them from his interior and gives them their own life in a canvas.

Jorge Rando, Malaga, January de 2004