Miguel Ángel Campano

I am not interested in what they call style. There are painters who spend their whole lives searching for a style. Often, what counts most in an artist is the attitude.

— Miguel Ángel Campano

Miguel Ángel Campano (Madrid, 1948–2018) was one of the most irreducible and complex painters of his generation. Over five decades, his career moved through radically distinct territories, from the geometric investigations of the seventies to the final synthesis in which painting attains a formal plenitude, passing through the literary intertextuality of the Vocales, the rigorous dialogue with the French masters, the catharsis of the black series, and the journeys to India that transformed his relationship with colour and matter.

While much of modern painting consolidated its authority through the construction of a recognisable language, Campano made transformation his principle of coherence. Each time an investigation seemed to reach its maturity it also encountered its limit, and the response consisted, always, in abandoning it in order to begin again, assuming the risk of leaving behind a language already conquered, as if painting could remain alive only by avoiding any form of repetition.

What unites these disparate territories is a deep conviction, sustained to the end, that painting functions as an act of thought and that the canvas constitutes a space where visual possibilities can be interrogated in their totality. Inhabiting the multiplicity of what painting had been and of what it might become, Campano allowed each investigation to open new directions, and that radical freedom became the most clearly recognisable trait of his production, a voice that maintained force, consistency and singularity through continuous variation.

Michel Foucault described the author function as a "principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning", a name that gathers disparate works under a unity that neutralises their contradictions. The name of Campano inverts that operation: it designates heterogeneity itself, brings differences together while preserving them, and makes proliferation — of registers, of materials, of directions — its own way of producing meaning.

We can easily imagine a culture in which discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form or value, and whatever treatment we gave them, would unfold in a generalised anonymity. The tiresome repetitions would no longer be heard: "Who is the real author?" "Do we have proof of his authenticity and originality?" "What has he revealed of his deepest self in his language?" New questions would be heard: "What are the modes of existence of this discourse?" "Where does it come from, how does it circulate, who controls it?" "What placements are determined for possible subjects?" "Who can fulfil these diverse functions of the subject?" And behind all these questions one would hear scarcely anything but the murmur of indifference: "What matter who is speaking?"

Michel Foucault, What Is an Author?, 1969

The diversity of registers that characterises his work thus emerges as its principal strength, evidence of a pictorial mind permanently open to new possibilities, exercised through matter, gesture, speed, density, surface and the construction of space. Much has been written about his changes of register and his references; less frequent has been the effort to think of those changes as an ethics of painting, in which the resistance to settling into a language already mastered turns each mutation into a method of knowledge. His rejection of style was, above all, a gesture of freedom.

This exhibition brings together works spanning four decades, presenting a career that advanced through leaps, contradictions and continuous reverberations, and traces a practice in which works converse with one another while preserving their differences, where large canvases coexist with works on paper, serial investigations with self-contained pieces, and moments of extreme restraint with others of intense gestural expansion.

What remains unaltered is the rigour with which Campano confronted the act of painting, understood as a space where visual thought can unfold in all its complexity, where form generates meaning and every formal decision constitutes an act of reflection. His independence from the logic of style, of the market and of the consolidation of a recognisable identity made him the most unruly painter of his generation, and his work, sustained by the certainty that painting remained a place in which to think, to experiment and to produce meaning, one of the freest and most rigorous of its time.