Literature: De la Torre, Alfonso and Rafael Pérez-Madero. Fernando Zóbel:Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (1946 - 1984). Madrid: Fundación Azcona, 2022. Listed as "no 64-31" with full-color illustration and painting description on page 285.

ABOUT THE WORK

The Dance of Lights Zóbel’s Dynamic Musings Fernando Zóbel’s arrival in Madrid in 1959 was met with a thunderous welcome and ushering with it a new chapter to his artistic career. Almost immediately after his arrival, he mounted a solo exhibition at the Galería Biosca, a gallery that espoused pictorial modernity as a response to the apathy that the official initiatives interacted with contemporary art. A place for the erudite and the socialite of Madrid to gather, this exhibition is the perfect place for Zóbel to encounter Madrid’s artists and critics, who in turn became taken with his cutting-edge abstraction. And be taken with them they are. Critic Manuel Sánchez Camargo praised Zóbel’s exhibit in his 1959 Zóbel, stating: “Zobel’s work is, above all, intelligent work. This is so because of the care taken in measuring the shapes, the effects of the colour, and the nice appearance of the piece. There is no carelessness in Zobel’s canvases; indeed, a profound understanding of composition influences how they were created.” Castro Arines’s review of Zóbel’s exhibit emphasizes this further. “What surprising worlds has Zóbel brought before us in his paintings?” he says. “The paintings on display at Biosca could be ascribed to the world of dynamics, if dynamics could feasibly be grasped in painting, if movement and air could be held in the painter’s hands like bodies that obey the principles of his inventions.” Zóbel’s recognition and subsequent bout of inspiration in Spain was highly evident when the artist returned to Manila to mount another exhibition in 1961. Full of wanderlust, Zóbel is known to have traveled around the world, from the Philippines to the United States or Europe and back. With his increasing trips to Spain by the end of the 1950s, it is only logical that his works from then on will take on Spanish influences. This radical change was noted in his 1961 Philippine exhibition. He was a different painter when he returned to his home country, his works radically stripped down and his exhibit fully abstract. They were now “new abstractions” as critic Emmanuel Torres described them, the shining result of his Madrid sojourn. His 1964 Cuatro Luces – meaning Four Lights in Spanish – features the slow return of colors in his works after his purely monochromatic works of the earlier decades. Still predominantly black, white, and grey, Zóbel inserts the slightest bit of color through the soft blue in the grey fog as well as the small dots of yellow light. By 1963, a year prior to Cuatro Luces, Zobel moved to Cuenca, a city some two hours from Madrid, to set up the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español. A change in the scenery meant another wave of inspiration for Zóbel, as evidenced by Cuatro Luces, whose soft fog and gentle waters remind him of the view Zóbel has from the window of his Cuenca studio: the mouth of the Júcar River. Zóbel’s Cuatro Luces belies in its solemnity a sense of drama and tension. “Zóbel’s abstraction was always classified as lyrical, despite his affinity to art informel, perhaps because of his use of black and white,” writes Alfonso de la Torre in Fernando Zóbel: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings 1946- 1984. With a touch of the Oriental, Zóbels works is a catalog of his jet-set life, his inspirations spanning decades and continents as he, like many great artists, internalizes this melting pot of inspirations, turning them into a piece of work that is undeniably and unequivocally Zóbel’s. (Hannah Valiente)