PERIPATETIC PAINTING

It is very common to find that one of the vocations of the photographic medium is to portray or reflect the daily reality of the society of the time in which it has lived. However, it is not easy to find examples in which this same exercise is proposed in the field of painting.

One such case is that of Alfonso Martín, who develops personal logbooks through the drawings made in his daily wanderings. Works that he has been compiling for a few years now, in sets that he has been grouping according to his consideration. They are everyday scenes, without apparent transcendence, not sought, in which the movement has been frozen by the artist through his markers. Situations discovered in his many walks around the city limits, in the transition spaces between the countryside and the city, in industrial parks.

I must admit that I feel a special admiration for those who find the creative impulse in movement. The benefits of walking were once publicized by the Peripatetics or Machado, but recently a scientific study by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan has shown that movement in general, and walking in particular, help ideas to flow more easily within us. More and better ideas come to us. I'm sure Alfonso knows the benefits and that's why he practices them.

When one looks closely at the drawings on paper that the artist presents at the Adora Calvo Gallery in Madrid, one realizes that he is gifted with a tremendous ability for drawing and that, with a manifest fluency and spontaneity of the stroke, he achieves a significant amount of nuances that bring an atmosphere of mystery or silence, of disturbing tranquility to his drawings, with the invaluable support of the frequent and masterful chiaroscuros.

But continuing with the parallelism that we have established at the beginning of the text between the direct complement of photography and its extrapolation to painting, I think it is interesting to highlight the framing, as an added value of the artist's work. That delimitation of the image that only masters like Bernard Plossu or Elliot Erwitt can exercise. In Alfonso's case, that personal point of view that cuts the "conventional" general vision of a scene to a certain frame, endowing it with a special mystery or enigmatic nuance.

What are the frequent anonymous characters in his drawings, the solitary passers-by in nameless places, often accompanied by dogs, doing?

Why this concrete, partial shot of buildings, containers of indeterminate lives? Why very rarely the appearance of concrete homes?

Why this special predilection for cars, motorcycles, bicycles, skates, airplanes, helicopters and trucks?

Why the exotic touch of palm trees and surfing?

What does he try to teel us? I can't help but ask myself this question when I go through his drawings and imagine his walks through the streets with the only company of markers and papers. He doesn't make it easy for us, because other artists, of similar craftmanship, as is the case of Marcel Van Eeden, offer us a narrative veil, but Alfonso seems to be much more hermetic. His way of expressing himself plastically seems to coincide with a similar stance towards the artistic medium, which, by the way, also makes the gallery owner's bet more valuable and plausible.

This posture of the artist, a bit of an outsider when it comes to understanding and practicing the profession, only contributes to reinforce the idea that his manual work is in any case consistent with his way of understanding life. We are in front of a whole: the man and his work, we are in front of honesty, that word so pronounced but so little exercised habitually, that allows the artist to live a little outside the lobbies, in search of a sincere encounter with himself.

Emilio Navarro. February 2021

 My spirit takes everything before I

I realize that total mastery is not just license, but arises from the perfection of details. But when my brush touches the paper it goes as light as the wind. My spirit carries everything before it, before the brush reaches its destination.

(Luis Racionero, "Texts of Taoist aesthetics")