At a certain moment which coincided approximately with the emergence of abstract currents a sort of Manicheistic concept of aesthetic structures was established, particularly in painting. This duality leads to no end of meanings linked to this sharp but in fact artificial division which opposes Realism and Abstraction and perhaps more subtly ‘Anti -abstraction’.

     Critics and Historians of Painting have become over scientific and in their eagerness to individualize any display of creativity they dissect its elements in such an exaggerated way that as well as losing the properties and consequences of their relations, they lose the very primary unity, in other words the meaning and reason ( clear or unclear) which guided the elaboration of the work. In the end since this study is limited to just a few figures the specialist ignores the rest of the artistic reality or relegates it to a mere confirmation or denial of the resulting appendix. It is true and even inevitable that for didactic purposes and for order students of History of Art find they have to break the evolution of history in order to establish general categories and styles so that we can we can understand the purpose and procedures which guided the works. These groupings may be based on chronological, formal or social aspects but we should not forget that they are fictitious divisions, artificial divisions which give ‘an’ explanation of ‘a’ concrete thing in ‘a’ certain moment but which do not always fit a lineal approach (whether based on time, place or style).
People speak of Classical Painting, of Romantic, Realist, Naturalist painting etc. and they build ‘their’ new dialectic base with such sharp distinctions that it seems difficult to place a composition in any other dimension than this carefully constructed one. For this reason it has come to be considered an intellectual aberration to judge, for example, that Classic Painting is more abstract than contemporary painting, that Romantic painting is more ‘symbolic’ than Cubism or that Gothic painting is more academic than Academicism, to give a few examples. In fact, as the centuries pass, the more open the resolution of painting has become, the more watertight we have made the stylistic compartments. If it was already a problem for a chronicler of the time to accept a work with a theme of local customs and manners (‘Costumbrism’) from a classical painter, when the criticism is developed in this century, the intellectual harangue is nothing if not comic:

<< Painter X began his artistic journey giving his first pictures a ‘futuristic’ content from an ‘informalist’ perspective. After a short ‘expressive-abstract’ phase he made his first adventures in ‘action painting’; this experience was used later in the condensation and production of his best ‘pop’ works…… He moved from a very ‘romantic’ naturalism to a very ‘classical’ ‘figurativism’ and then fell into the convenience represented by a mannered, cold academicism………>>

     The problem is that the effort to discover shades of meaning in Art distances us from its more reasonable, intuitive perspective and, more seriously, we end up making Art into an amalgam of concepts which are unintelligible because so many contradictions build up. But in our desire to be protagonists we try to go even further, even talking about the artist, and this takes us to nonsensical situations. There are many examples of artists who are astonished to hear a critic say the interminable meanings and purposes found in the construction of their own work.

     So here we are looking at one of the most flagrant paradoxes in Art today, we have a whole encyclopaedia of terms which make up the Art of Painting this is the decade in which we use least words to communicate about it. Nowadays, Galleries, Foundations and Museums establish a dangerous dichotomy between just two words to "understand each other": Realist painting (Hyper realist for those who consider themselves more advanced) and Contemporary painting (everything else which has no significant similarity to formal reality).

     Let’s try to have another look at these concepts which today have been simplified in such a banal way.
What is realism? If we hold a historical vision, it corresponds to those artistic movements which introduce ‘real’ themes in their repertory, leaving aside mythological, religious and fantastic themes to enter a world of characters and situations usually considered unfitting, even going into depressive and sordid elements as a way to highlight ‘real’ life. This search is linked to a rejection of Ideal Art and culminates in the 19th Century with Courbert. Realism has a more direct relation with its themes than with stylistic discourse since it is seen in the introduction of everyday settings and attitudes and of social outcasts such as the poor, ragged children, old beggars, humble laundry women etc.. Of course, this is nothing new, it has been known since Ancient times (Egyptian scribes, Dutch domestic scenes which historians have come to call ‘genre scenes’, the adventures of Goya and Velázquez with defective and monstrous elements).
     So what is the new factor in the 19th Century? It is the rejection of rococo excesses, exaggerated idealizations and the ‘saturation’ of academic doctrines and of the imposition by the wealthy of their tastes, which were more closely connected to decorative interests than to artistic expressiveness. Today, the imposition of bourgeois and aristocratic taste has been replaced by the dictatorship of the laws of the marketplace, directly connected to fashion and advertising, and by the taste of the masses. While they are not illiterate, they do not go very deep into risky intellectual concepts and who understand ‘original’ to mean simply something that has never been seen since they no longer expect it to communicate anything to them; as Chesterton said, they would swap heaven for hell just for the novelty.

    What is realism? If we hold to its formal perception, it is recognised as that genre whose compositional motif can be identified with a being or object in our environment, and established opinion today more than ever holds that the more visually similar the motif is to the model, the more realist the painting. (This is wrong and ends up paralysing Art’s creativity, lyricism and power to charm and also leads to the loss of its identity as Art faced with the discourse of Photography).

     And Abstraction? What is the Abstract in Art? Trusting in the readers’ intellectual capacity, I invite them to extrapolate the conceptual dynamic used in realism and use their intuition to try to make the concept concrete from both its formal and more theoretical aspects.

     But even if we accept (and I don’t) these two ways of classifying Painting, the spectator’s distrust when contemplating a picture comes precisely from the separation of theses two elements, which co-exist in any work of art. So when I evaluate a work of art, my vision starts from a more conciliatory basis; supported by the builders of the history we know, I establish two basic categories:

The idealization of reality. This starts from nature or what we see and gives it a series of subjective elements, giving a soul to what has none and projecting the mental aspect to transform it into something different.

The realization of an idea. For me this is the essence and the superior state of Art. Here we start with something that emerges in the mind of the human being. When transferring it to material, the artist endows it with elements which enable this ‘idea’ to take on a ‘reality’ and come closer to the receptor or spectator; this idea is executed in such a way that in the process the expressive elements which are the soul of the work of art take form. This is seen in works which are part of our essence as thinking beings. Can anyone imagine Olympus differently from how it was ‘made’ in the time of Pericles? Can anyone imagine the participants in the Last Supper sitting differently from how artists arranged them? Well, these ‘realizations’ correspond to compositional arrangements related to harmony, beauty and expressiveness more than to pure reality. Isn’t it ingenuous to think that the Virgin Mary really only wore primary colours ?The truth is that this chromatic arrangement corresponds to a calculation of the harmony, composition and expression of colour which leads the artist to ‘execute’ his idea of the theme in the most perfect way, artistically speaking.
When Michelangelo makes a sculpture, the anatomy starts from his thorough knowledge of the subject but his expressiveness when executing it distorts this knowledge and adapts it to his compositional schemes and expressive rhythms, going one step beyond nature; just as a musician arranges sounds which exist uncomposed in the universe, the artist arranges what nature offers, purifying, transforming and altering it to show us something new that as well as a purely physical and material component is given a soul, an idea which transcends it and becomes more alive for us than nature itself.

What conclusions can this arrangement lead us to ?:

• That in both categories the means and the end mix, coexist in their developments.

• That whatever does not conform to one of these principles does not reach the category of Painting as a noble Art. Yes, I disagree with the politicised current according to which ‘everything is art’ and ‘everything goes’. Everything isn't art and everything doesn't go. I insist that the trend of thought supported by the new redefined glossary of our time does not have the validity of what more than thirty centuries have defined so fluently. It’s like trying to change the goal of chess: time has varied it and introduced rules in its development but was never so foolish as to change its goal (i.e. the first to take the pieces wins).

     Painting is an Art and a Science, every work has a subjective part which may be more or less lyrical and another part which is governed by properties extrinsic to our will: the spectator senses them, the painter knows them, the master controls them and only the balance of the two parts will give a work quality.
     In this context, when I am asked to define my style I can only look up and lose myself in a sea of ideas and realities that my work has travelled through, and I am lost for words.
Do I idealize reality ? Yes. Do I give reality to ideas ? Again, yes. Do I abide by formal reality ? Yes. Do I transgress it ? Again, yes. Does my brushstroke blend ? Yes. Is it flowing and vague ? Again, yes. Do I work ‘alla prima’? Yes. Do I use soft, transparent colours? Again, yes. Do I paint landscapes ? Yes. Figures ? Again, yes. We could start playing around like this with related paradoxes using dozens of examples but then I would sketch what I have tried to state so succinctly about what painting has always meant. Can the search for a conciliatory form of Art be considered a style ? Yes. Can we give a name to the association of so many concepts? Not according to the approach of current artistic thought , but as I see it we can, and this name is none other than ‘Painting’.

 What is the style of my painting ? my painting isn’t chasing a style, it’s just Painting.