Essay by Ángel Guinda for Vicente Pascual "Las 100 Vistas del Monte Interior, en recuerdo de los antiguos locos" exhibition catalogue at the CDAN / Fundación Beulas, [see DF catalogue interior, PDF catalogue exterior], Huesca 2006.
"Las 100 vistas del Monte Interior / En recuerdo de los antiguos locos", is a Vicente Pascual book with 101 project-specific drawings accompanied by short verses writen by the author. Published by the Government of Aragón in collaboration with the CDAN/Fundación Beulas, Huesca, and Olifante, Ediciones de Poesía.

The Luxury of Simplicity

Barely 40 years after Edward Kienholz coined the term ‘conceptual art’ and Sol LeWitt formulated the movement’s first theoretical thesis, Vicente Pascual offers us a much-awaited gift for our eyes, intelligence, sensitivity and culture. And he does so after having dared, in the course of an increasingly productive and perfection-obsessed career, to tear space (and time) in order to see beyond.

After overcoming the linguistic-tautological aspect of conceptualism, distancing himself from the object, and having assimilated a certain factual or mental approach with respect to images and perception, he has opted to pursue a direction oriented by a tendency towards mysticism, linked to Platonic thought and certain initiation processes that involve a maximum degree of existential subjectivism and complicity with intellectual objectivity.

"Las 100 vistas del Monte Interior" (The 100 Views of the Inner Mount) is a masterpiece painted by secret poet and written by an exemplary painter.The work as a whole is utterly restrained and in an exquisite style in terms of the way it pursues, expresses and communicates extreme beauty; a silent canticle of the most fecund and spiritual serenity; active stillness, intimate restlessness; dark space illuminated by the mystery that is the reality of the idea; colour as the hands of an interior light.

Pascual’s work is an in-depth investigation of core issues and is aimed at re-humanising a world that is out of balance and numbed. It is an attempt to move towards tolerance (or even attraction) between nature and art, towards the harmonious coexistence of opposed strengths and weaknesses, as if it were still possible to rebuild an awareness laid low by the ruins it has brought about, and prevent the final collapse of our civilisation as a result of its having regarded everything superfluous as necessary because everything necessary has been seen as superfluous.

We find ourselves before the ineffable (as timely as it is dramatic), a historic event: proof that the price of an undying work of art is a life.

Ángel Guinda, Madrid, 2006

Ángel Guinda has written over twenty books including: "Vida Ávida" and "Libro de huellas" For more information: www.olifante.com | www.olifante.com/guinda/biblio/index.html

home ||paintings | vitae | essays | bibliography | contacts | español