The exhibition of Miguel Ángel Campano presented at the Centre del Carme consists of two clearly defined parts. One traces the painter’s work from 1980 to 1989, and the second, conceived specifically for this occasion, develops a body of work centred around Poussin’s painting Ruth and Boaz.
“The first section, of a retrospective nature, begins with the first series of Las Vocales or Voyelles, as the painter preferred to call it. Certainly, by the time Miguel Ángel Campano painted this series, he had already developed an intense artistic activity during the previous decade. From that period date memorable paintings such as El puente, Macao, El Zurdo, or, even earlier, the constructivist-oriented work that was shown in his exhibition La Ventana (Madrid, 1974) at the Iolas-Velasco Gallery. The series Las Vocales constitutes a meaningful starting point because it expresses part of the synthesis that, through different forms and modulations, has defined the inner core of his later work. Thus, in the two series of Las Vocales presented here, made in 1980 and 1983 respectively, the very title itself — Voyelles — reveals a first aspect of this synthesis: the modes and approaches of the American Abstract Expressionism with which Miguel Ángel had become familiar in the previous period, and the great French cultural tradition embodied in one of its most lucid, rebellious, and radical figures, Arthur Rimbaud.
Mistral (1981–82), El Diluvio (1981–82), and La Bacanal (1983) still belong to this context. However, in El Diluvio and La Bacanal there is a turning point that brings an enrichment of the synthesis that Miguel Ángel had been progressively developing, which I have already mentioned. I am referring mainly to two things: on the one hand, the emergence of a narrative intention within the painting and, therefore, the appearance, at the limit, of figurative elements; on the other, the turn towards the French pictorial tradition. In El Diluvio, a tremendous and violent painting, one of the strokes forms the serpent — a metaphor for evil — that appears in Poussin’s painting (L’Hiver), which he uses as a point of departure. In La Bacanal, in turn, it is not difficult to perceive the forms of bodies that initially refer to the nude bathers of Cézanne. Nature plunging into the abyss, or the abyss of bodies in a chaotic mixture, Campano’s adherence to a culture of evil remains evident.
Poussin and Cézanne would become two fundamental moments in the painter’s reflection. However, while the work on Poussin would be postponed in time and would not reappear until the series La Grappa, centred around El Otoño, one of the four paintings on the seasons painted by Poussin, the reflection on Cézanne would occupy his immediate activity. It is within this period that the Montañas, Las Flores, and the two paintings El Músico and La Modelo belong. The study of Cézanne led Campano, literally, along the route of the painter from Aix and introduced two new elements that would remain constant and would reappear in very diverse ways in later series: his taste for landscape and for still lifes, or Natures Mortes, as he prefers to call them in the French manner. Regarding landscape, Campano turned to Mont Sainte-Victoire and other places in Provence, painted au plein air for the first time, and developed a highly varied body of work with small canvases and watercolours. Later, in the studio, he would develop a kind of progressive synthesis of that meticulous analysis carried out in situ. It should be noted, however, that the work on Cézanne progressively establishes a radically different viewpoint from the previous one: the canvases are no longer the passionate expression of a subject, but rather the result of a kind of archaeology of our subjectivity, or at least of our “pictorial subjectivity”. Without doubt, the landscapes are supported by a process of d’après nature work that implies a certain desire for thematic fidelity, but it is no less true that this work is consciously mediated by a pre-existing language — Cézanne — which is intended to be analysed. His analysis of Cézanne does not appear in the form of quotation, but — allowing myself the analogy — as reflections on new “speech acts” emerging from a given language.
This archaeological turn would find its first masterful expression in Los Naufragios.
The other major section of the exhibition is made up of the work that Campano has painted specifically for this occasion. All the paintings are conceived and painted around Poussin’s Ruth and Boaz (Summer), a work that Campano had already explored by painting some small-format pieces in 1986–87. The 366 ink, pencil, and gouache drawings on paper may give an idea of the meticulous method with which Campano carries out his analytical task.”
From the text by N. Sánchez Durá for the exhibition catalogue
