Geologías
José Carlos Llop
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I've often asked myself about the tendency of contemporary Majorcan painters toward abstraction and conceptualismo With few exceptions - curiously, some of the best known and most highly esteemed among them -, my contemporaries have opted for abstraction. The truth is that different causes must exist for this genetalised affection. The first that occurs to me is Antoni Gelabert and his use of the palette - those geometric strokes of his landscapes. Being the paintings by Gelabert so me of the finest Majorcan paintings of all times, it is logical that this threshold open to local painters the pathway of the intellectualised landscape. The second is the presence of Joan Miró on the island as a real avant-garde and heterodox institution in the Majorca of Development Plans. The painting of Miró - seen as something very close - and, especially, his life among us made possible his relationship with artists such as Motherwell or Calder and a connection with Maeght - by way of Sala Pelaires - that would not have existed had loan Miró not lived on the island. The third is the rejection by my contemporaries of the escapist painting of landscapes and seascapes that the painters of the Francoist autocracy had us so accustomed.
In this same period - that of the landscape painters being confused in the critical disorder of an imposed order - one had to set sight on other views to abstract oneself and at the same time investigate in the abstract. The lenses of Spinoza comributed to philosophy and I remember a wood stove whose front doors - those through which the ashes are removed - had Little windows made of sheets of mica. Through these windows one discovered the decomposition of light produced by the fire and also by the slow decomposition - as if they were organic elements - of those glasses like sheets of petrified cellophane. In this stove - which was in the office of my maternal grandfather - I took my first steps in the knowledge of a certain plastic abstraction - in the aftermath of Malevitch or Kandinsky - and in this stove I thought when I saw, for the first time, the visual effects of so me of the paintings of Concha Sampol. I thought of the speckled transparency of mica, in the geometric fragments of orange light, in the mysterious geology of fire. And gradually 1 slowly entered in a sea of ice with frozen blocks like ships that collide with each other and the cracks that are formed are rivers of glass and in the white ships we see earth-coloured veins and minerals that shine in the depth.
In the most recent paintings by Concha Sampol this landscape - which previously had been enclosed 'in ice - is the reallandscape. There is something Italian - almost Pompeian - in the colours of these most recent paintings as if following the study of the ice a civilisation there would have emerged that fire has over time razed everything, leaving us the essential: the memory of colour. And in the centre, sometimes, a black square like a crack in that memory, like an absence. "Entre tinieblas" is the title of one of these paintings. And the earth - or the water - are the words of others: "Toscana," "Ferro," "Agua," "L'Orangerie," "Azul marino"... in this memory of colour is bom another possibility of the Majorcan abstraction of Concha Sampol. Concha comes and goes from the island and when she retums she is leaving again, just as when she leaves she is returning. It is such an insular characteristic like the desire to be where one is noto But if in the first paintings I saw she enclosed herself in a maritime fatalism, now it is the voice of the earth that speaks to us through them. This earth that on leaving from the air offers us a puzzle of gardens - those of the Pla de Sant Jordi - that used to be swamps and was drained. In those quartered gardens, I'm afraid, that are so clearly seen from the airplane that flees, is the final cause of this Majorcan tendency towards abstraction and conceptualismo The memory of its colour fragmented, like the fragments of our life that we lose along the way.
Palma de Mallorca, January 2004