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Ten Days in August

Original title: Diez días de agosto

Curro González

1987

Mixed media on canvas

Dimensions: 20 units: 33.5 x 33.5 cm each

Reference: ACF0417

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A cursory glance at Curro González's painting might lead us to think that his is a universe of quiet, peaceful forms. However, by looking a little deeper and sifting through two decades of work, we come to realise that darkness and even trauma emerge regularly in his painting, where nothing is what it seems, giving rise to doubts and ambiguities that do not, however, hinder the presence of irony and distance. During the eighties, González was linked to the breakaway spirit that grew up around the art magazine Figura, founded in his hometown of Seville. In those years, his work insisted on expressing a world where emotions seemed slowed down, cooled in a fragmented composition that avoided the stridency of the Italian Transavanguardia and German Neo-Expressionism—all the rage at the time—like the plague. Diez días de agosto is a jigsaw puzzle, insofar as it is made up of twenty small pictures revealing an upper image submerged in the shadows of a subdued colour range. To extract an orderly narration seems a futile enterprise, because the artist only gives us clues, signs of a possible locus where the hustle and bustle of humanity is conspicuous in its absence. However, the drawing of buildings, of a cave with a door, of a jar or a child's hat shed light on the night of the painting. We are looking at a collage of muted visual impacts where emptiness is as important as—if not more than—the fill of life. In other, later works, he introduces references to artists of the past—Hogarth, Goya, Daumier, and the Precisionist group (Sheeler, Crawford) who tried to blend Cubism and Futurism in the twenties—with the aim of saying something about the reiteration of forms, about monotony and perception, about people's lives steeped in disenchantment and melancholy. One might say that Curro González pursues the silent image, which keeps him apart from the madness of roaring voices and noise that make up the contaminated contemporary world. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that he is a hermitic artist, isolated from the rest of humanity. Not at all; otherwise, we could not explain the fine paradoxical sense that permeates his painting and that mix of humour and cold reality, as though we were observing an old film in slow motion, furrowed with smiles.

Juan Vicente Aliaga