Cristino de Vera : the flight of purity

              Cristino de Vera:
The flight of purity
JONATHAN ALLEN
As very few cañarían artists have done, Cristino de Vera
represents a sober inward looking visión, the construction of
a world that isn't ideologically exceptional, yet that possesses
a unique aesthetic clarity. Cristino looks out to the castillian
horizon, much the same way as did the young Galdós, and
we can safely say that he'll never again lose sight of them.
He is fascinated from the very first moment by Avila and
Toledo, and they become symbolic lands of confluence, places
where the interior shape of his painting looks outside; a skull
contemplates from the window sill, the neat square design of
a medieval city, where mysticism has flourished, in the vicinity
of stark natural scenery. The bare essential realism of the sie­rra,
despite the mythification of the 98 Generation, connects
with something that Cristino already knows. I think that his
exquisite sense of order, that the economy of objects and
symbols that change places from one painting to another is
the outcome of his cañarían identity, and that his dominance
of space, that becomes progressively luminous in his dramas,
isn't mere chance, but the gradual clarifícation of a metaphy-sical
order that he spontaneously has because he has known
poverty, things in their most frugal measures, and that radical
continuity of the most simple domestic utensiles, such as the
table, the stool, earthen jugs and wicker baskets.
Poverty and precariousness determine his visual world. At
the beginning he covered surfaces with ochre, blue grey and
brown tones, during the early 50's. Much later, light will
enrich, and lighten these initial backgounds, fragiiienting and
separating colour that he groups in small strokes. There's
some kind of añinity with pointillisme, although I believe Cris-tino
doesn't pretend to ape Seurat's scientific and cold recom-position
of visión, his fragmentary perception expresses a ner-vous
faith, a state of suspensión that always characterizes his
idea, a sense of how things gradually gain shape and become
real, imposing their silhouettes on the void.
During the early 50's he explores religious and pious female
portraiture. He creates icons of romanic virgins, that evoke
the tragic realism of the School of Madrid then extant, and
that can also be observed in latin american art of the period.
This frontal pose that he chooses to represent the woman-virgin
with, forever guarding an altar, or her prívate closet
that is the world of solitary, unyielding domestic struggle, will
never leave his art. The angularity and rigidity of this obscure
family, period, with paintings of people standing in straight
Unes, arms and hands mechanically raised in exclamation, will
lead to the softness and undulation of the female body in the
70's and 80's, that in exchange of her facial features, eyes,
mouth, nose, is blessed with rhythmical sweetness and spiri-tual
incorporealness.
All of Cristino's morenetas from this period créate an abs-tract
and semi-cubist división of the body into volumes, that
then blends with a preconceived verticality in the concept of
pictorial space. Elongated and thin, his virgins seem to
remind us of El Greco's bodies that tapar upwards in celestial
elevation, though in Cristino's case they are at the same time
rooted on earth by their totemic immobility that prevents
them from flying of to similar heights. This tensión between
telluric roots and spiritual plight runs through the painter's
work, and will only be partially redeemed by the later pre-sence
of light. Imaginería, 1956, is a somewhat frightening
image. The romanic tótem, with eyes painfuUy open, contrasts
sharply against a cold blue grey background, inhabited by
saint-puppets, tending to abstraction. Yet his religious gloo-miness
doesn't ruin his sensibility, that could easily have stop-ped
dead at such an iconic point. Mujer con libro, and Mujer
con Rosa, both of 1957 (Woman with a book and Woman
with rose), characterize the female figure, although the overall
sacred stiffness is retained. Yet volume is more generous and
relaxed, physical symmetry isn't as starkly perfect, and these
portraits reveal psychological attitudes. Woman in introver­sión,
eyes closed, in ecstasy, or carrying the symbolic objects
of the metaphysical banquet. The reredos, the vertical monu-mentality
of the church has been replaced by a series of wide,
sombre bands. Womankind is the guardián of the interior
world, the animal who keeps the house, in a universe singu-larly
lacking masculine gesture and forcé.
Alongside these exploratory female icons we fmd the still
lives of this period, that are magnificent statements of
yw
Cristina de Vera. Figura Homenaje a Pepe Espaliu. 1992. Oleo/Lienzo. 92 x 73 cms. Cortesía: La Máquina Española. Madrid.
sobriety. Poor natures martes, that seem recently unearthed,
and that normally dwell inside the earth, surrounded by a
kind of dusty mist. Any still Ufe of the epoch, wheh european
organic abstraction was flourishing, generating geological inten-sity,
perhaps couldn't be painted differently. However, despite
historical determinants, that are of secondary importance for
him, Cristino essentially depicts a peasant's humble fare on
the table. He doesn't covet the palatial wealth that piles up
fruit and meat in the classical dutch nature morte of the
seventeenth century, that sensual disorder of Abraham van
Beyerem or William Kalf, nevertheless still imbued with a con-textual
realist hardness. The simplicity of Cristino's still life
is the quintaessence of the spanish bodegón, the sober kitchen
table of Velázquez, suggesting to the observer the act of inner
consciousness that accompanies thanksgiving for our daily
bread. Here, the intemporality of an attitude informs the pain-ter's
hand and colour. Cristino de Vera simultaneously exhi-bits
a powerful symbolic dimensión. He lines his objects up
on the table, allowing fertile distance to medíate between
them. Puvis de Chavannes, who showed us his fisherman
bowing to his futile rod, at the centre of silent, mental nature,
hemmed in by uncomfortable, revolutionary pictorial planes,
could easily have painted one of Cristino's natures mortes.
His humble, primary table, is the prelude to his dramatic
manipulation, when he sets loóse, always within immobility,
the power of symbols that lightly float through all the stages
of his art. His economy is thus evidenced in the beautiful con-tainment
and Interactive forcé of roses, baskets, or skuUs, that
travel from one space to another. These elements will later on
appear in spring fields, out in the country, resting on nature's
bed, and will move towards the horizon, or if they remain
indoors, will penétrate successive layers of space.
Giorgio Morandi established a similar clarity in his naturas
martas of the 1918-20 period. Each object has its neat, corres-ponding
shadow, its undeniable place, and between them we
find that signifícant distance already mentioned. The back-grounds,
the luminous feel of Morandi's still lives are of a
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Crístino de Vera. Tríptico. 1993. Oleo/Lienzo. 243x100 cms. Cortesía: La Máquina Española. Madrid.
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clear brown colour. What he then does is to depict the cut
half of a mannequin's head, a metaphysical-surrealist action,
that anatomy of the absent body, of the statue-automaton.
From the end of the 50's and throughout the 60's, Cristino
builds up his symbological drama, he expands a condensed
and scarce metaphysics, through the repetition and iteration
of his sacred objects. Niña dormida, 1963, (Girl Asleep), is
an aesthetic death-setting, one of the painter's culminating
symbolic moments. On the edge of a square table, slightly ele-vated
at its furthest end, lies a girl that a flat horizontal per-ception
has peculiarly placed there. She lacks any features or
other distinguishing factors, although her attire is old-fashioned,
capped and swaddled in tight infantile clothes. The-re's
something archaic about this mannequin, this inanimate
object. She is neither real ñor living. At the other end, three
baskets with three single roses also seem to ascend towards
perspective depth. That static, frontal alignment of the poor
bodegones has given way to a rich associative process in Cris-tino,
to a curious unreal order, that is one of the basic pro-cedures
of twentieth century metaphysical painting, and which
stems from surrealist juxtaposition and oneiric visuality.
The table is an altar, or a bier, the ancestral slab of death,
that also serves for eating and discussion. In Llanto por el
torero, 1964 (Mourning for the Bull-Fighter), we contémplate
another corpse, this time formally deceased, while an undu-lating
woman prays at his feet. This activation of space in the
60's offers us exterior, pastoral visions, like Mujer bajo el sol
en un campo de ñores (Woman in the sun in a field of flo-wers)
where the curving line dominates rhythm and we see a
kind of naif naturalism that reminds us of Henri Rousseau.
Towards the end of the 60's, light becomes a protagonist
in his work, insinuating itself through the gaps of his brush
strokes, fragmenting and adding extra mobility to visión, ba-thing
his still Uves in a clear aura that at first he seemed reti-cent
to paint. We find the skull of the sic transit gloria
mundi appearing, the skeleton of Valdés Leal, of that spanish
tenebrismo, the direct imprint and touch of death. Death will
be a steadfast eating partner from now on, it will occupy the
place that the roses in the basket once held, and it will usurp
the role of the living eye that stood on the threshold of the
house, like Janus. Yet this arrival of biological fínality also
brings spatial unfolding and depth. The small, inside windows
of his rooms now give out onto infinite space in perspective
flight, creating a near, domestic distance. It is the plural, rich
space of the spirit.
Through the wide window spaces of his walls, Cristino now
sees a cementery that will have different shapes and sizes,
until we are able to reach its city, and so be connected with
social destiny and history. The skull is a simile of the Janus
look, of omniscience that traverses Time, and that man, impli-citly
possesses. However, he decides to represent the eternal
in man, what is constant in him, through death, made swee-ter,
by the presence of light. Cristino de Vera is heir to an
ancient mediterranean tradition, that erects a necrópolis as the
observation point that leads to knowledge, and uses art to
edify the most grandiose tomb. Cristino de Vera, as keeper
of christian piety, of western religious sentiment. At times his
cranial still life proves asphixiating.
Towards 1990, the painter wants to synthesize his notions
of history, which he achieves in his series Ventanas a Toledo
(Windows giving on Toledo). The wild landscapes of 1954,
with their strong black Unes, their explosive skies, and their
scraggy arid mountains and vallies, are very distant from
these formalistic, geometrical images of Toledo, home town
of the spanish soul, the magic town of Spain, surrounded by
its strong walls. Civilization is urban rationalism, this hive of
ordered lives, that the skull's hermetic silence seems to criti-cize.
Beautiful is his 1987 window, opening onto Tenerife,
that permits us to glimpse a fantastic, blurry city hanging in
the air.
Cristino de Vera doesn't keep in step with time. Somehow
he turns his back on it. What is unalterable about his pain­ting
is the faithful and tranquil use of essential things, that
love of his art's vital objects, flowers, baskets, skulls. He is
unshakeable, he performs variations on a unitary visión, he
is a legendary ideal of stillness, of faith, that in the long run,
is self-nouríshing.
Cristino de Vera. Tres tacitas, raso, vela y pared. 1992.
Oleo/Lienzo. 100 x 73 cms. Cortesía: La Máquina Española. Madríd.
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