Antoni Saura

Saura is a sculptor of colors, dramatic and revealing

Antoni Saura's Portraits

In the monograph mentioned, Francisco Calvo Serraller writes on Saura's 'Dames' and portraits of women: 'Goya ne discernait plus tout à fait déjà où il commençait ni où cessait le veritable visage? - Le masque n'est pas pour Goya ce qui cache la face, mais ce qui la fixe..' (Did Goya no longer quite discern where the true face began or left off? - For Goya, the mask is not what hides the face but what fixes it...) In the photograph of Antoni Saura's studio, everything has eyes. The five paintings in the background recall the ones available from Grafos Verlag. Even the wickerwork armchair has eyes in its double curving armrests. The view from the window on the crumbling cliff face becomes a face (1989). Saura is a pathbreaker who rejoices in his painting. He is first and foremost a painter. His work was once accurately described with the adjectives: 'ritual, natural and responsible.' His visions surge from the painting process, from the handling of color and brush and the artist's sensibility. 'The gesture is both method and release with Saura, reconstruction and fantasy, and it may just as well lead to a fine lady or a naked person.' Saura gave age-old themes of painting a new turn. In 1990, on his 60th birthday, his illustrated books were exhibited in Cuenca, and he painted a large canvas in Barcelona to texts by Jacques Chessex: 'La muerte y la nada' (Death and Void). Not to be forgotten - Antoni's brother is the Expressionist-Surrealist film director Carlos Saura - and here we touch upon the early Parisian period and Surrealism.

Saura takes up the traditional Spanish portrait form, paraphrases it, and is simultaneously dead-earnest and full of the sharpest scorn. He transformed that which was opposite him into the white and black oxides, the sulfur, sienna, umber and ochre of his artwork. The ladies, for example, under the borrowed forms of Cubism and Informal painting, have liasons. Saura's portrait gallery follows the entangled paths of a labyrinth. Whole bodies fuse into the armchair. The borders between inside and outside fade. Picasso's late work finds a parallel here. With Saura, painting becomes the drama of irreconcilable satire. The portrait of Goya flows smoothly into that of a dog. Everything becomes the outcry of the creature. The theme of the portrait is modern to the 90's. Uncompromising. It is a fixation on space and form akin to that of Alberto Giacometti. But a type of suffocation is also portrayed, faces which leave one speechless. Scratch out the darkness until the voice is regained. That is resistance. Not so far off the mark, when you consider that Saura, as a protest against the Franco Regime in 1956, burned his 'books', and that he destroyed hundreds of his own paintings in 1965. 'Julieta of the Academy' (1960) shows that the scrawny and careworn Anitas and Agneses and Stellas (1960/61) on dark gray backgrounds (oil on canvas) represented the silent majority. The Infantas are also placed in such surroundings. Strange beings with heads that appear to be dead, their jewelry hangs about their necks like the trophies of head-hunters. The faces disappear behind the styled hair and the clothing.

Graphic art is produced throughout his entire work period. In 1972, Saura creates, among other things, some silkscreens by the title: 'The King' to texts by the Cuban writer, José Lezama Lima. The 'Rembrandt' silkscreens (1969-73) show the endless riddle of the face, as in the series 'Moi' from 1976 - a hesitant attempt to come to terms with the material. In the landscape nudes, the 'Nu paysage', the sculptor is at work. Every form is taken up and repeated. A large, wide, horizontal rhythm impregnates the surface of the painting which has been split in two. The high-format works represent the 'femme-fauteuil' (armchair-woman). Fusing together with the object on which she rests, the woman becomes the armchair upon which she invites to sit.

Through an attempt on his life, his studio in Cuenca was destroyed in 1978. With brushes and their handles, he drew out his own image from the canvas through his own contradictory gestural style. Aesthetics was thrown overboard. If it tried to wormed its way back in, he scratched its skin, so that silence would be meaningful, evoke a scream at least - so it is in the crucifixions as well as the self-portraits, paintings in a 2-meter-high and 2.5m-wide format. Saura takes up themes of taboo and tradition.

'Saura's faces surge out of the depths of an abyss. It is precisely the look which throws the abyss itself at us, as if the only hope were arising from the chaos. Yet it comes from too far afield for our words to grasp'. What counts for Saura is unconditional painting, the force of color and the intensity of realization.

He applies the paint with the palm of his hand. Pain can be identified, recollections of childhood, of bombardments, beheadings and lies, the time of the civil war. The self-portraits become monsters grinning on the burning rubble. Its as if Saura had wanted to scratch the contents of his works out of the darkness with his fingernails and had retreated in shock as the light seeped in and showed a face.

It was if Saura had grasped the horror, repression and helplessness that he had been through, as if he had wanted to prove it all. The faces permutate head upon head, the opponent multiplies. In his 'constellations', balls of color whose intensity has faded and in which darkness seeps into the white, fuse and then separate, as if attempting to call up the memory of brightness. Against the lines, vitality is transported in bursts like in a subconscious dream. ek