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Exhibitions
Group Show
Fernando Mastretta. Weltlandschaft
18/12/2010 - 29/01/2011
The Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery presents the second individual exhibition of the painter Fernando Mastretta (Barcelona, 1961). Under the title of Weltlandschaft, a visual interpretation that combines the semantic and historical connotations and implications of the term, the painter makes a direct reference to the convergence of concepts around the idea of landscape and the behavior of the image as a whole. After all, as Victor I. Stoichita proposes in his work Simulacros, those dreamy scenes of the Weltlandschaft that combine the remote point of view of Nordic origin with the pleasure of archaeological detail more to the liking of artists active in 16th-century Rome now serves Fernando Mastretta as a starting point for his contemporary interpretation. In this way, building the concept of exhibition from the idea of variation, he uses the same theme, the same motif as a common thread: the representation of a naked female body in front of the idyllic image of the landscape. And far from being an obsolete subject, the painter searches the corners of this classicism for the most transgressive and current aspects. Therefore, far from becoming an exhausted theme, the different versions that Mastretta proposes about this same contemplation multiply its meaning.
Thus we find some works that, based on an established and absolutely regulated scheme, and according to their technical and pictorial execution, hide the most paradoxical facets of painting: the demonstration that a singular and specific theme can lead to a plastic digression on multiple histories of painting. A system or a methodology that requires a pattern to overcome it; of rules that paradoxically lead inevitably to freedom. This is Mastretta’s current formula: approach the painting with a predetermined idea in order to obtain the difference from the norm.
Something that at a formal level constitutes a type of painting that is rigorous and at the same time spontaneous, premeditated and free. With the most common pictorial and conceptual resonances in Mastretta’s recent work in the background (the grandiloquent and classic history of painting and poetry, from Velázquez to Picasso, from De Kooning to Pollock or Ginsberg) on this occasion the viewer will find more synthetic ones that reduce the formal structure to a calibrated use of drawing and painting. Sinuous strokes interspersed with sensual layers of color; line, spelling, background and form, combined with unconscious spills of resins or oils in flight or permanent flight. By alternating methods, in which the image is constructed either from the shape or from the background, the paintings turn out to be a kind of positive or negative variation. If sometimes it is the color that delimits the form, in others, the precise and clear line or the decided stroke compose the scene without any other resource.
Works as free as howls, which from the limits of a defined pattern acquire an unusual autonomy.