La imagen pintada | Antonio Saura

ILLUMINATING THE PRESENT with presences from the past? Reactivating a moment in the past through the memory of the present? Such attitudes are doubtless possible, it being permissible in any event to try and liberate oneself from the weight of history via the incipient present. We run the risk, however, of simplifying a fascinating problem—the inevitable dialoguing with the past—by reducing it to its possibilities of suspect nostalgia, or even of powerful revelation, albeit through an effective apparatus of formal decantation. The problem, as I see it, is located in a very different realm, the fear being that any attempt to clarify things further reduces the dimension of an incontrovertible fact from which no artist escapes and that the actual author of the model which concerns us in this text formulated with clarity and clairvoyance.

SAURA, Antonio. “La imagen pintada,” In: VV. AA.Antonio Saura. Figura y fondo. Barcelona: Edicions del Mall, 1987, p. 171

Published in With rebellion, awareness is born. Barcelona, 2018. Mayoral. p. 88