I went to La Roda in the spring to attend the opening of the exhibition of great painter of Rodense Antonio Carrilero and, a few weeks ago, I came back to visit the workshop of José Antonio Alarcónactive painter, who perpetuates and renews the great tradition … of innovative realism that characterizes a large part of contemporary Castilian-La Mancha painting.
It seems that art is the attraction that unites me with this charming town of Albacete, responding to the motto that its active mayor, Juan Ramón Amores, wants for the place whose destiny he manages. With its historic and well-established Posada del Sol recovered as an exhibition and cultural center and seat of a stable section dedicated to Carrilero, the desecrated Church of San Sebastian offers a magnificent and very large space for large-format exhibitions.
Like this Bellezza, like this Italian style, with two zetas, with which Alarcón entertains his viewers practically until the end of the year. This artist’s oil paintings range from meticulousness to virtuosity. Its key seems to lie as much in the look as in the brush and palette. It is the landscape, rather landscapes, which interests the painter almost exclusively. Without discrimination: ennobling tufts of creeping grass, whose perfectly captured movement acquires symphonic connotations, or capturing the majesty of the northern beeches. Alarcón paints his land of La Mancha but also frequents other latitudes: mountains, forests, seascapes. His homage to beauty admits neither corsets, nor borders, nor terroirism. But his painting joins the aesthetic line which, with the great Benjamin Palencia as a common thread, characterizes much of the best artistic production of the region throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century.
Painting Festival this exhibition, for which it is worth leaving the highway and entering the hospitable street of La Roda. The Zen attitude of the painter: his incessant contemplation which captures all the nuances (light, color, movement) of the moment on the recreated space, this stopping of time, imbues the landscapes with magic which thus transmit all the authenticity of their beauty. And yes, it’s so much that we can now double the zeta. Italian style, another cradle, like Spain, like Castile-La Mancha, of the best art.
In a welcome message entitled “Visual Therapy”, which opens the exhibition catalogue, Juan Ramon Amoresmayor of La Roda, writes: “Through his paintings, he reminds us that beauty continues to be a refuge and a certainty, a place where culture meets emotion.”
A fellow painter, Julio Segura, writes of the Rodense artist: “It is difficult to look away from a canvas that screams silence and sorrow.”
And in his text, the critic Ramón Moya: “Only a medium like the artist understands the language of nature, he communicates with it through his brushstrokes, loose but deliberate; it emits with light, colors and shadows. In addition, it receives and creates from the harmonious composition of perspective and textures, until becoming part of it by exposing the concept of communion to the maximum.
I enjoyed contemplating these paintings, which have behind them so many days, hours, moments of contemplation, mental recreation, projection and memory. Nature is transmuted into magic and this is where the spark of beauty emerges, like in the clicking of two flints. We perceive there a passion, a life dedicated body and soul to pictorial creation. I would like to highlight three paintings from this exhibition that particularly moved and moved me (each will have their own): the majestic storm that descends on the dog Moon, The Dance (wind and grass), an unparalleled capture of the flow of nature, and Liberty (summer sky), in which extreme figuration caresses the fingers of abstract asceticism.
What could be better than a few verses from José Antonio Alarcón to close this article:
“This wind which shapes in its own way
his moan, which filters through the doors.
Who can explain such beauty?
Antonio Lazarus
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