The painting
Faced with the emergence of photography and mass reproduction techniques, painting has moved towards abstraction, and has found its salvation in abandoning the conventional and conformist representation of the subject. Instead, it chooses to reclaim these aspects by drawing upon rival images - photos, icons, snapshots, even photograms - and making them its subject. Ever since his youth, Francisco Rodriguez del Canto has practiced drawing and painting in an almost exclusively figurative vein. In 2008, he began an extensive pictorial project, which culminated in 2013 in the simultaneous production of three parallel and complementary series, united by their interest in the issue of appropriating images. The CLASSICO serie features famous masterpieces from the history of classical painting, presented with a mixture of reverence and defiance. The serie HUMANS (the Fighters) reproduces both well-known and anonymous photos portraying men and women caught in the midst of war. The SOMEWHERE serie abandons or atomizes the human figure to engage in bold graphic experiments on the perception of space. The three series share the fact that they use pre-existing images that the painter appropriates in a two-stage process. First, cropping: concentration on a fragment of the image, redefinition into a square format, and expansion - with the canvases measuring about two meters wide. After reproduction, the paintings are subject to two subsequent types of treatment: either layering, which, by playing on the effects of transparency and disguise, tests the possible areas of correspondence between two images, and the substance of each; or brushing of the canvas in horizontal strokes, spreading the still-wet paint and blurring the original piece. Both methods serve to probe the images, questioning what makes their identity, their integrity, their inviolability. Many painters have addressed the ambiguous power of the image, at a time when it can be technically reproduced with such ease: by taking on board its industrial dimension (Andy Warhol), recycling its proliferating forms (Sigmar Polke), or duplicating its fascinating banality (Gerhard Richter). For his part, Francisco Rodriguez del Canto is trying to reverse the reification process specific to images and to revive its subjects: personalities frozen in the glacier that is art history; soldiers' smiles drowned in the ocean of the internet; architecture held captive to a coolly aesthetic reading. Paradoxically, it is by brushing and overlaying, i.e. making changes to the surface, that the painter plunges us back into the depths of the image, to bring out its buried heart. So this work on blurring the image, rather than distancing it, brings it closer. The glacier melts, the screen providing separation dissipates, the flesh warms, and a hidden narrative appears behind what seemed to be simple portraits and interiors: it's a return to the power of the brush, and a reconciliation between painting and the reign of images.
The CLASSICO serie takes on paintings by the masters (Velasquez, Rubens, El Greco, Goya, Manet, and more) - "quoting" them in a citational approach with its own specific rules. The purpose is not to plagiarize, nor to simply duplicate the works: the cropping systematically focuses on a character, often redefining the center of gravity of the original image: from two paintings by Georges de La Tour (The Fortune Teller and The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs), the painter keeps only the woman and her face; in Velasquez's Las Meninas, he leaves the famous game of mirrors to concentrate on the bust of the Infanta. These representations, which have passed through the history of art to become cultural icons as well-known as Warhol's Marilyn, return to the canvas and immediately undergo shock treatment: the hybridization of two paintings, or the application of irreverent brush strokes. The painter literally attacks these works, which have haunted his artistic life since his drawing classes as a young man at the Granada school of fine arts. Through the eyes of their characters, haven't these masterpieces been challenging all painters, for centuries, to dare to attempt figurative art? Francisco Rodriguez del Canto's response can be expressed in a physiological metaphor: to grow and move forward we must take nourishment from our models, assimilate them, digest them, and dissolve them in their own pictorial juices. Swallow so as not to be swallowed, as it were. But the gesture of the artist, liberating for its own ends, seems also to liberate these characters, shut away in masterpieces like cultural tombs. Isolating and magnifying the faces of these men and women, whether anonymous models or historical figures, means turning this daunting dialogue with the classics into an exchange between two faces, two people. Despite the suffocating weight of art history, these paintings seem to say that art must remain an inter-personal affair.
The CLASSICO serie
The HUMANS
serie
There is a certain continuity between the refashioning of the painting Tres de Mayo by Goya (CLASSICO N°1), and the picture of the loyalist soldier hit by gunfire (COMBATTANTS N°10), immortalized by Robert Capa in 1936: in a way the two series are twins, despite the fact that the HUMANS serie is inspired by photos. Initially, the painter worked with famous pictures, like that of Capa or the photo of the child in the Warsaw ghetto (COMBATTANTS N°11), but then he decided to focus on one historic event - the Spanish Civil War - and limit himself to amateur photographs, found online. What the process loses in the strength of its citational approach, abandoning universal iconic references, it undoubtedly gains in emotion. Magnifying these small photographic prints to life-size seems to resurrect the ghosts buried by history. Instead of playing on the typical pathos associated with images of war, the painter focuses on portraits of people who are armed, but smiling at the camera, both soldiers and civilians, in a troubling tension between violence and happiness. The gesture of brushing the canvas, iconoclastic in the CLASSICO serie, is enhanced by new symbolic connotations. It increases the fragility of the photographic medium, itself a metaphor of passing time, and of a fading memory, whether individual or collective. Blurring the image also evokes a lack of focus, the melancholy reverie of the viewer, their eyes wet with tears. Erasing facial features, more marked than in the CLASSICO serie, also seems to say: regardless of identity, all that remains are the gestures, the gun on the shoulder, and the valiant smile. Is there something to be digested here too, in terms of the painter's family history, closely intertwined as it was with the Spanish Civil War? The emotion is ambiguous, the purpose is neither autobiographical nor directly political. It is inextricably pictorial and humanist, offering the canvas as a special meeting place between two worlds and two faces, that of the viewer and that of the anonymous person in history.
The SOMEWHERE
serie
The serie SOMEWHERE seems, in contrast, to be a more emotionally neutral area of graphic research. The artist takes on images of interiors without any characters, but rich in architectural details or anecdotal accessories - a church arch, a bourgeois salon, a cluttered shop - to completely deconstruct the surface using splashes of bright color, attenuating brush-strokes, of textured overlays. But this neutrality is only apparent: a place is no more neutral than a human figure, especially for an artist who has long invested in the field of interior architecture and design. The colorful vandalism of this series, which is sometimes akin to "tagging" in its use of spray paint and neon colors, is perfectly in line with his work on the CLASSICO and the HUMANS series: breathing new life into fragments of reality that are under threat of becoming atrophied in the image, whether famous figures, anonymous faces, or places shaped by the human hand.
