Tino Grandío. Correspondencias. Colección de Arte Abanca

Galeria Francisco Fino is delighted to announce Vasco Araújo's group show Tino Grandío. Correspondencias. Colección de Arte Abanca at Centro ABANCA Obra Social of Santiago de Compostela, until 27.04.204

 

Tino Grandío. Correspondencias., an exhibition that brings back to the present the figure of the painter from Lousada, Lugo, a painter with a personal style within the proposals of art in Galicia in the fifties, sixties and seventies and that in 2024 celebrates the centenary of his birth. Ahead of his time, he quickly connected with the assumptions of the New Figuration but his work quickly took a particular path, taking as a reference in its renewal to the country's own historical heritage with the work of Velázquez, Goya or Picasso, and executing a painting of expressionist character but with a great social content, while he was able to temporarily anticipate in terms of style to the proposals of artists as important in our contemporaneity as Luc Tuymans or Gerhard Richter. 

 

Grandío's work, which is widely represented in the ABANCA Art Collection and in the Afundación Art Collection, enters into dialogue, in correspondence, with that of other contemporary artists, with special emphasis on Galician creators who have in the figure of Grandío one of their references.

 

 

The exhibition is organized in its correspondences based on a series of thematic lines and genre review, which runs through Grandío's work throughout his career. Thus, Grandío's portraits, and his approaches to the meeting places of social and cultural life, marked by the idea of erasure and the liquidity of painting, and which at the same time give concise and exact clues about the society that surrounds him, They correspond with the work of artists who follow the same lines of approach to painting as Alain Urrutia, or with others such as Vítor Mejuto, who, on the occasion of this exhibition, versions in geometric key two important works by Grandío in the ABANCA Art Collection, such as Guardia civil, mujer, vaca (1966) and El café Gijón (1968). 

 

The landscape genre is also present in the exhibition through a series of seascapes that establish connections with creations like Carla Andrade's audiovisual piece Amarillo atlántico, which connects us with that profound vision of the Galician landscape, attending to the yellow color of the granite in the Serra da Groba and alluding to the magical religious character that marks in many cases the approach and the experience that Galician society has of the landscape, or also the correspondence with the work of other artists such as Cristina Garrido who, in El color local es un invento extranjero (Denmark), approaches from a perspective close to the so-called institutional critique to the revision of landscape painting in Europe, focusing especially on the clouds and the representation of the sky, something very remarkable also in the work of Grandío.

 

Paintings by the artist such as El cementerio de Lousada from 1973 serve to relate his work to other types of pieces on the limit of figuration and abstraction such as Cuadro-tumba de Álvaro Negro, which maintains not only an obvious thematic relationship with Grandío's paintings, but also a marked correspondence with Grandío's liquid painting, with the use of gray, green, yellow and brown tones, and with that effect that the artist from Lugo already used in a pioneering way in his series of series of paintings, but a marked correspondence with Grandío's liquid painting, with the use of gray, green, yellow and brown tones, and with that effect that the artist from Lugo already used in a pioneering way in his series of mirrors in the seventies, temporarily anticipating in decades the painting of Gerhard Richter in his Mirrors. Grandío's landscapes also provide space for correspondence with the abstract painting of Manuel Eirís, concerned, like Grandío's, with concealing and revealing the layers of color, in a systematic exercise of trial and error on the painting itself.

 

Women, for their part, have an important presence in Grandío's work. Her exercise of detachment and condensation connects well with the conceptual vision of artists such as Julião Sarmento, whose installation Kiss my eyes (with chairs) is present in the exhibition. The reference to the female nude in Grandío's work is also present through paintings in which there is a clear reference to masterpieces such as Velázquez's Venus in the Mirror or certain portraits that take us to the pictorial compositions of Modigliani, as well as to the revisions of the genre by the post-impressionists. In contrast to Grandío's masculine and classical vision of the female body, the contemporary and feminist vision of artists such as Eulàlia Valldosera, who introduces the everyday element on the scene, and the revision of the projected image of women, and also the filmmaker and artist Xisela Franco, whose maternity also reinterprets in a contemporary key the abstract and geometrizing vision that Grandío gives us on the subject. Finally, the work of Jesús Madriñán in his series Good bye London, brings a very updated revision with a portrait of youth in nocturnal environments through his photographic proposal.

 

The still life is also one of the themes in which Grandío exercises a more profuse figuration. In this case, his still lifes correspond to those made by Los Bravú, the artist couple formed by Dea Gómez and Diego Oimil, and to the works in which Tamara Feijoo approaches the theme of the Hortus conclusus, the private gardens of Gothic and later Flemish religious painting, through her small abstractions in which color and stripping take center stage.

 

Finally, the vision of the Galician rural territory is also very important in Grandío's work. The artist from Lugo made many paintings in which the labors of the field, the tools used by the farmers, the fair scenes are common in his work. The correspondences in this case are established with the work of Christian García Bello whose work deals with issues related to tradition and the vindication of his own forms, crossing thematic and formal issues and the treatment of the materials themselves, and also with the work of Julia Huete, whose abstract forms made of fabric, also mark a clear allusion to the vernacular, to the form of female labor and connects very well with the simplified form so characteristic and significant of Grandío's work.

 

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Opening

 

19 Oct 2023