Artesantander 2023

We participate in Artesantander 2023.

Stand / Booth #32

Artist:

ANTONIO MONTALVO

Sin título (Del natural).

«An exhibition of my work is nothing more than a meeting of paintings, I never work around a series. That’s why this exhibition is not going to hace a theme, it can’t have it.” Antonio Montalvo told us in the press release of his individual exhibition of the year 2012 in the gallery. In those years his painting was more narrative, literary. Even cryptic. With the passage of time it has become more poetic, ascetic and almost mystical. As if the works were about to desappear or as if they had never existed. Pure essence like a simple haiku.

«Here,as in everything, my idea es: only what is necessary. I almost always have plenty of the titles of the paintig exhibitions, except when they say, barely: painting, chosen work, work on paper… or when they simply refer to the date of the paintings, as in the case of Pérez Villalta. Nothing but those generic, simple things – nothing intellectual – that a grandmother, my grandmother, should understand.”

Antonio Montalvo paints from the deepest feeling.his works work like contemporary vanitas between spaces and disturbing elements. Works that force you to look slowly, carefully, works with beauty and a certain decadence, despite their youth, or thanks to it. His work is filled with symboli elements, which do not want to give answers, but to provoke the imagination of the spectator, inmersed in a kind of mist that captivates. He himself says that the task of art in general, and of painting in particular, is to find a form of expression for which it cannot be verbalized.

His work in recent years has directed its way, in a semi-inconscious way, from a slow rigorous and studied painting to one that overflows with spontaneity, based on an inmediate presence, a painting taken directly from nature. His pictorical journey progressively moves away from the photographic reference and resorts to the original, where he becomes intimate with what surrounds him. Throughout that process, his work remains anchored in the joyful contemplation of reality and life. All the works have something in common, they are painted naturally. A time and a shared space. “From Natural” we could also title this set of works, with the permission of Antonio.

With this project of Arte Santander we hope to bring to light the complex world of the painter, the path he travels and the progress and turns that painting, always alive, suffers and is enriched.