Ángel Guache. Poemas geométricos

12 march, 2001 - 11 april, 2001 /
Sabatini Building, Espacio Uno
Exhibition view. Ángel Guache. Poemas geométricos, 2001
Exhibition view. Ángel Guache. Poemas geométricos, 2001

Angel Guache’s (Luanco, 1950) artistic work is based on a language that takes its main elements from music and poetry, such as geometry and silence, and transforms them into his personal grammar. Under this principle, it is when he paints that he puts them into artistic categories, in such a way that variation and repetition become his main compositional devices, without discarding his nature and the musical and poetic reminiscences.

The title of the exhibition: Poemas geométricos, refers to his two main vocations, poetry and art, both marked by a "subtle and stark rationality" -in the words of the artist himself- which refers to an interior elemental.

The thirty-something paintings and drawings in this exhibition are from between 1989 and 2000. In his pieces the use of blues and greys dominate and reveal the role Guache gives to the composition and architecture, from the use of line and the painting. The forms and the lines of the painting, with no conditioning spatial signs and without any mention of an active time, appear ethereally suspended on the surface of canvas. Its purpose is not only to make harmony and order visible, but to make a balanced art with which to transmit, ultimately, silence.

Ángel Guache participates in Minimal poetics and transforms reduction into the mark of his work (reduction becomes the mark of his work), which he arrives at through a volunteer economy of means, a constant search for pureness -hence the preference for light and clear tones- and the lack of ornament in favour of the purity of the geometric figure.

In the opinion of the critic and exhibition curator, Juan Manuel Bonet, Guache shares, with many artists from art history, an inclination for the sublimation of forms in search of a synthetic representation of the world. Particularly noteworthy are those who lead a poetic approach to Minimalism: Pieter Jansz Saenredam, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Giorgio Morandi, Yves Tanguy, Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Brice Marden and Sean Scully, among others.

In his series Equilibrios (1989) Mondrian’s lessons remain. In the series Homenaje al cuadrado (1990-1992) he follows and interprets the theoretical and compositional patterns of Albers, as evidenced by his preference for the figure of the painting and the study of chromatic and compositional behaviour on the canvas. In this way, Guache’s tributes to the geometric painters are explicit in the titles and in the spirit of his painting.

Exhibition´s details

Organized by: 
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Curatorship: 
Juan Manuel Bonet
Artists: