A landscape, reiterative, lighted up with a bright blinding light. A silhouette, imprecise but close, a figure, an expression, a gesture
maybe evident. Maybe latent. And, perhaps, a familiar figure, human, non-human, sculpted, stony, volatile. Its movements, its outline, voluptuous.
Dark night and a landscape and a figure, oblique, discordant, sometimes obsessive, reiterative most of the times. Under a tree without shadow.
A landscape with a tree, a landscape-tree, with a moon, without a moon, with a sun and an ashen sky.
Dance, the bath, walk, contortion. Sleep and wakefulness.
Germán Portal presents Estudio para figura [y paisaje], his second solo exhibition in Madrid. An exhibition where, as the title indicates, he
shows a series of paintings focused on two common subjects in painting tradition: the landscape and the figure (a figure traditionally human,
a female body, nude, odalisque, the bather, the model or Venus herself, to mention some examples).
Portal addresses these topics in an outlined way. They are issues which have been idealized but also standardized and connected with the same
tradition (it would be unthinkable not to understand the study of the figure-body and the landscape without being connected per se with the
History of painting itself, being even a part of painting itself, of its own history).
Beyond these considerations, the exhibition is displayed like a large study (as the very title of the show indicates). Everything is part of a
large study. A study of an indeterminate body and landscape.
But there is another key element of the tradition underlying this Project: the so called “study”, the work that it is not intended to have the
definitive character that we find in the great works, even though it could have it.
In this case, this “study” is put on display at the gallery through an ambiguous mechanism, which combines sculpture and installation. A device
where painting plays a main role: showing us a space and a latent landscape, which is uncertain but at the same time close. A landscape where the
familiar body reverberates.
Germán Portal 's website.
Here you can download the information about Germán Portal's exhibition
