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Tanz der Hände / Werner Janssen
Meister des zeitgenössischen Realismus in Spanien / Michael Nungesser
Le mouvement capté! / Jean Jour
Le journal La Libre / Jean-Pierre Keimeul
Hispanidad Realismo spagnolo
Futurs Renovateurs / Raúl Alonso
Formas y Métodos / Raúl Alonso
This interesting exhibition offers us a chance to have a detailed look at Alejandro Decinti and Óscar Villalón’s most recent preoccupations, examining their creative and teaching facets. Whilst some of Alejandro Decinti’s recent works show evidence of the inclusion of elements of abstraction placed at the service of figurative sketches, Oscar Villalón shows a particular interest in recalling his experiences, but expressed in a way that is always thought-provoking.
In 2004 these artists founded the Decinti&Villalón Painting Studio at their headquarters at 4 Calle del Castillo and 19 Calle Santa Feliciana. It is an ambitious project that unites academic teaching in different fields such as, pictorial methods, composition, drawing, computer techniques applied to the plastic arts and open-air painting, together with recent proposals such as, children’s art workshops, galleries or publishing space.
The educational role of these artists is clearly important and plural. It is no minor task for them. Just as the university has no alternative but to react in the face of scientific progress, in their teaching and methods they include the continuous transformation and mutations being undergone by pictorial creation arising out of the contributions of the new information technologies, computer applications, etc. When we share the space of Decinti and Villalón’s works, we come face-to-face with the cream of their pupils’ output. We are referring to canvases that speak of many things, but their interpretation has no confines.
We can state unreservedly that this is a group of painters that are characterised by the predominance of communication, sincerity and spontaneity in their respective artistic achievements. Through this modesty of exhibition, the artists attain a pleasant way of communicating their experiences by taking the guidelines set by their young teachers.
This provocative style thus fires pupils’ creative possibilities, stimulating them and furnishing them with all the freedom needed to create and interpret the subject matter approached on their canvasses, starting out from coherent, sincere foundations related to pictorial procedures instilled from the very base. Likewise, a carefully considered rational control of the pictorial outcome emerges as the ideal means for achieving the essence of their figurative conception.
The Higher School of Naval Engineering, which was formerly the Academy of Naval Engineers, founded under the orders of Charles III in 1772, affords the perfect framework for this interesting exhibition, and, if, as the French historian Fernand Braudel says, "The sea is wealth", we can state that art enriches us and this exhibition delights us.
Cataloguing Alejandro Decinti and Oscar Villalón, as merely two realist painters sheds little light on the obsessions and preoccupations comprising the works of these two effectively contemporary artists.
Although their images, every single one of which is the fruit of conscientious study and analysis, clearly reveal their concern for the relationship between man and his environment, their coming closer to what is figurative does not occur as an act of rebellion against what is technological and global but rather puts forward a multidisciplinary dialogue. Nothing is simple or left to fate but just the opposite; the conscientious study is part of a creative attitude where all that is formal is a vehicle to express a topic and vice-versa, the only important thing being the end result.
With a figurative repertoire that seeks the essence of the shape of objects and configures a space as a living entity, these two brilliant young artists incline towards a vocabulary that is essence-explicit in order to penetrate the rich possibilities of a plastic dialogue between painting and reality. Therein resides the modification of all that is ordinary to elevate it to the category of the sublime as part of a conceptual approach. The painting is then charged with more than one meaning, it contains the surprise of the artist before the unknown, before those tangible heights where to record its interpretation simply requires a minimum of resources to convert the pictorial visual discourse into an event.
This exhibition reminds us of these two painters’ dual condition as artists and teachers. Art is made up of fragments of truth, common truths that lead us unequivocally towards a knowledge of the History of Art. The artist is a teacher, and the awareness of contemporary man’s immense cultural richness is translated into concepts, into an art of the future.
The exhibition is presented to us as the climax of a cycle, one more link in the career of these two painters who are heading for a future full of projects and expectations.
Decinti and Villalón transfer us through their painting, from their local space to the universal, metaphorical space of the spirit and the soul, a place where curiosity and hard work give way to the sound tranquillity of the artist that does not bend to the passing whims of inspiration. Imagination is the fount of creativity, but only goes hand in hand with a mastery of the plastic arts and clear objectives. Thus, they have the last word.
Raúl Alonso
Historiador del Arte
chinchon_natural@yahoo.es
l´acqua / Flavio Arenzi
Alejandro Decinti y Oscar Villalón: Miradas Complementarias / Raúl Alonso
