Vicente Pascual: Paintings From the Exilio
The mix of shapes and rough surface in Exilique Reus is too elaborate for a wall design, and Pascual’s signature at the lower right asserts that, yes, this is meant as art. Alternating triangles create zigzags, and there are four bulbous curves near the center. Each area of color–mostly thick, dark greens, browns, and yellows, plus white–is rough and mottled, as if part of a decaying frescoed wall. The design is almost perfectly symmetrical.
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This painting whispers rather than shouts to its viewer. At the center two lines form a cross, and a tiny blue rectangle surrounds the point where they meet. Given the painting’s width and near symmetry, this rectangle seems almost anticlimactic–and that’s exactly the point. The single points around which Pascual’s patterns revolve are strangely empty. Furthermore, the painting is actually on two canvases; and the blue box is divided between them (in fact, the vertical line of the cross is formed by their abutment). This implies that the design is independent of the media supporting it, as if Pascual were painting a fragment of a reality larger than any canvas. “Art makes sense,” Pascual has written, “because man has the need to free himself from the ego which restrains him and the world which fragments him.” And indeed his art seems a search for something larger than and other than a picture–for a center or a source not reducible to the visible.
Among Pascual’s interests is the art of nomadic peoples (he mentions “the Touareg, North American Indians, the Mongols, and others”), whom he admires for their “equilibrium between time and space. They have no roots anywhere, not in a concrete place but in nature.” Pascual’s works too have an equilibrium that depends on displacement. Western painting tends to revolve around focal points, objects or shapes that are given power over others within the composition. Pascual’s works have centers, but paradoxically his nearly symmetrical compositions deflect focus from those centers, just as his rough surfaces balance painterly freedom with precise geometries.
