Exhibitions
The return of Antón Lamazares
A journey through his career, from his informalist beginnings to the enigmatic visual poems of Alfabeto Delfín, at the Rocío Santa Cruz gallery.
Antón Lamazares (Lalín, Pontevedra, 1954) is one of the most prominent living Galician artists. He was part of the multidisciplinary artist collective Grupo Atlántica in its early days, along with other painters such as Antón Patiño, Menchu Lamas and the sculptor Francisco Leiro, which shook up the Galician art scene in the 1980s.
Born and raised in Maceira, near Lalín, Lamazares' work is closely linked to the Galician landscape and rural environment. He studied as a boarding student at the Franciscan convent of San Antonio de Herbón, where he read literary texts and the Greco-Latin classics. Reading, meditation and spirituality marked his education. In the late sixties he met the writer Álvaro Cunqueiro and the painter Laxeiro, who guided him towards writing and painting. He expanded his training as a self-taught artist in Barcelona and then settled in Madrid, where he met, among others, the poet Carlos Oroza, with whom he deepened a friendship that has not ceased to manifest itself. The relationship between painting and poetry will be a constant in his work.
His painting will evolve from an initial expressionism towards informalism and abstraction until reaching the minimalism that characterizes the work of recent years. Last year, the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea presented a major retrospective of his work entitled Lamazares. Inda é día (1973-2023). Also in 2024, the Museu de Montserrat hosted the exhibition Laus Deo, which showed a selection of Lamazares' latest work. Singularly, paintings from the Alfabeto Delfín series that are part of the latest work in which the writing of poems ends up shaping the work itself. By creating his own alphabet formed by plastic symbols that replace the letters, Lamazares creates monochrome paintings in which he writes enigmatic poems in Alfabeto Delfín. The series dedicated to the Spiritual Canticle of San Juan de la Cruz, from 2020-2021, allows, for example, to grasp how the artist translates the written text into the symbolic code that he has created with the name Alfabeto Delfín, in homage to his father. The material finish of the works, with incisions that pierce the cardboard or wood on which the artist fixes the painting with mixed techniques, contains the writing that becomes the essence of the representation.
Although Lamazares had exhibited regularly in Barcelona, his work had not been seen in the city for some time. Fortunately, Lamazares is returning to Barcelona. Until June 28, the Rocío Santa Cruz gallery presents the latest production of the artist from Lalín. It is worth contemplating, learning about and deciphering the works that belong to the Alfabeto Delfín series, where writing and painting come together in striking and enigmatic monochromes. The Rocío Santa Cruz gallery also recovers informalist works from the eighties and other well-known periods in the artist's long career, as well as artist books published by Raiña Lupa edicions. Lamazares is back.
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