Comments by Ana Pardo

This picture closes the first cycle of my “Ages of Art”, in its content I create a discursive element with an infinite number of variables. I have poured into it classical, modern and personal concepts. Each element that I chose, each change that I  made to it, has an aim and can be read both critically and artistically. The first reading seems clear: “Tradition and trade give way to the liberalism of abstraction”.

However, couldn’t this reflect a bitter criticism of either position?

“Beauty, the purest art that is consciously expressed,  gives way to impulsive subjectivism , to insubstantial content, to paranoia”. or on the other hand “The creative asphyxia of canons which globalise every expressive act falls defeated at the birth of the individualism of the unconscious, that irrational freedom of form which allows us to discover an artist in each person.”

But the picture will not remain nothing more than mere historical discourses, each person can take from it certain guidelines for the immediate future, which also contradict each other:

“Contemporary art must rediscover sublimity of expression, otherwise it will be left totally dumb and empty.” or “Keep the past on a parchment to let the creative act lower the horizon and find unthought-of ways of forming concepts.” or why not a balanced perspective? “The future of art lies in balancing thought concepts which seem irreconcilable, moving away from radical or extreme positions which control the artist.”

Leaving aside the general content, it is in the choice of each element and the technique used to elaborate them that the widest variety of meanings will be found; here the better-informed spectator will savour with pleasure the many hidden delights waiting to be released by an enlightened palate.

Why not a landscape by Claudio de Lorena or Francesco Guardi? At first they seemed more suitable to emphasize the past. Why are there two Davids, one a creator, the other a recreation? Does “The education of Maria de Medici” hold some secret sarcasm? What is the meaning of the space in the more Eastern structure of the Guggenheim?

If spectators can find answers to the omitted questions as well as those mentioned, they will discover endless scripts of artistic debate and be saturated with a memory which will remain forever at the bottom of their minds, reshaping their vision of painting to see it not as a decorative art but as a living entity which can speak to us and fill that special solitude which we feel when we stop to look at a painting closely.