Paco Dalmau, Polyptychs (2011)
After a long journey of learning in the language of art, Paco offers a vision of what is nearest and dearest to him, his family. And in so doing, he recovers the tradition of portrait painting, synthesising the experiences of his artistic predecessors, through large-format polyptychs. With this recovered technique, he transforms and decomposes the face into a detailed breakdown of spots, lines, colours and volumes, as if to microscopically dissect the soul of the character.
Paco Dalmau surprises us by continually changing his register and motivating his followers with new insights into the results he produces. This time his jigsaw puzzle portraits bring us closer to an evocative language full of subtleties and artistic metaphors as a compendium of the knowledge he has acquired throughout his career.
The gigantism of the compositions leaves the audience aghast, dramatizing the moment of their encounter with the artwork. Paco manages to infuse feelings provoked by an encounter with immensity into the spirit of the viewer giving rise to a transcendental experience.
Juan José Rubert Nebot
Assistant Director General Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports
Paco Dalmau and his tasteful obstacles (2011)
Ramón Gaya writes that “art is no more than a beautiful place of passing, a state –a state of passionate and weak adolescence-, that the creator-artist creator, the creator, he feels he must leave behind”. It is true, art is transit, an itinerary, an abrupt path that the artist travels in his permanent delving.
And in first place is the will to walk through the winding paths of art, of creation, not an easy route nor pleasurable because creative tension is just that: tension, effort, suffering. That is why even Gaya, in another place, says: “No, in great Works of art do not seek rest –great pleasure is incompatible with rest- because what you have to find there always is thick tasteful obstacles”.
I have known Paco Dalmau practically since the start of his artistic meanderings and I have followed with interest their course, I have seen him leave behind certain stages in search of his aesthetic ideal, of his own language, of his original expression.
Suyate is an unwavering desire that leads to both its affirmation and its denial by the work of his hands: affirmation because, one piece of work at a time, he is raising the building which is his artistic personality, and denial because he writhes in his fertile unconformity which leads him to ever more distant horizons: those new obstacles.
And Paco Dalmau confronts nothing more and nothing less than reality: he analyses it, he takes it to pieces, fragments it and reconstructs he expands it to gigantic proportions and ultimately, he works it with a radical artistic honesty.
Those of us who appreciate him, become fascinated by his pictorial progression, leaving behind former stages, he has become established as a painter with personality. That personality that we welcome because we see it forged in the naked fight that his own ideas sustain, always evolving, always renewing themselves, recreating themselves, always, and ultimately, trying to overcome those tasteful obstacles.
Alejandro Font de Mora Turón
Minister of Education Generalitat Valenciana
Paco Dalmau’s Polyptychs (2011)
There are notable differences between a photographic portrait and one executed by the hand of the artist. In my opinion the main difference is that the pose in front of the camera is just an instant, while the model poses for a much longer time in front of the artist. During this time models will change their expressions because their brain is active and fleeting emotions are registered in their factions. So the artist ends up being enriched by the synthesis of all these transformations of gestures.
When photography was born in the nineteenth Century, it was thought that this was the death knell of the pictorial portrait. This was not to be. It is trae that the portrait no Langer serves as the supposedly objective carrier of information. Today, if we want someone far away to appreciate our factions, we just send them a photograph. Before the invention of photography, there was no alterative but to find a skilled painter who Could reproduce them on some medium.
However, there are other types of representations with a difference: the representation of a scene with different planes of depth, much greater than that of the human face, a landscape, for example, a photograph will lie much better than a painting, forced to resort to the artifices of perspective to translate into two dimensions a reality of three.
Cubism would be the lucid consequence and would simply tie up the loose ends. From the Cubists onwards, the artist does not have to simulate anything, and is free to go as far as total abstraction if that is the language that he needs to make his art possible. The painting is now just the manifestation of its creator, who must look inside himself, and project what he finds. We do not need a Magritte to come along and tell us we are confusing the pipe with the representation of the pipe. Naturally, neither the picture of a pipe is a pipe, nor indeed is a photograph of a person a person, nor does a portrait done with whatever techniques have to be able to enable any identification by the similarity of features. The painting exists by itself, and its function is of another kind.
In the collection of Paco Dalmau’s Polyptychs: Family portraits” 2008-2011, the first thing I noticed is that they are polyptychs of decomposition, because when we speak of polyptychs in art (painting divided into several sections or panels) it often makes us think of the generalized polyptych especially from the Middle Ages, mostly designed for religious settings, the classical tableau: a structure that usually develops an argument determined by the addition of various images related to the topic, that are, in some cases, mechanically articulated, but use proximity to make up a narrative.
Paco Dalmau’s polyptychs however, pursue and achieve a different intention. An intention perhaps opposite in form, but maybe not so much at heart. Their result comes from the decomposition of an image, usually a single image that is broken down, disintegrated and fragmented as if it were a reflection in a broken mirror. But neatly broken into smaller regular areas that make up the whole figure, like tiles that do not quite join. And by using black as a separator, appear to be the bars of a grill. At first glance reminiscent of Mondrian, but only at first glance.
Nor is it a breakdown according to the proposals of Analytical Cubism and it has nothing to do with photographic collages of David Hockney, although they come to mind because these also tend to revolve around the portrait. However, Hockney’s creations intend to create a dynamic vision that Paco did not intend at all. Except for the piece titled Great family portrait (p. 59), our artist starts from a carefully studied static photograph.
Through it, he investigates, and, in his creative solitude, invests considerable time transferring the mechanically obtained mage to the chosen medium. That act entails a certain rebellion against the limited vision of a lens, reworking it in search of a human interpretation that is more personal and sincere, fulfilling himself as an artist and using his powers of observation from the intimate relationship with the people he is working with: his family, his friends, his loved ones.
His work is almost certainly a way to communicate with the people who matter to him.
Isabel Rubio
International Association of Art Critics
