Rafael Baixeras

(Puebla del Caramiñal, La Coruña, 1947 – Segovia, 1989)

Untitled

1984

oil on canvas

40 x 100.6 cm

Inv. no. 1420

BBVA Collection Spain


This mature painting by Baixeras boast great expressiveness and power. It contain vibrant colours and is shrouded in the mystery conveyed by floating heads or by emptiness itself. It belong to the serie Doble respuesta (Double Response) made by the artist in 1984.

Baixeras’ work combines echoes from
and from conceptual painting, permeated by undeniable lyricism. An underlying sense of geometry is also implicit in the neutral ranges of colour that gradually acquire warmer and more vibrant hues. Meanwhile, the colour stains, black, and the figurative elements are rooted in a dream-like world.

By returning to the notion of the window, the artist makes a painting inside the painting itself. The long and narrow window creates a double space confronting an empty surface and a full one through the use of colour; or those two heads floating in space, perhaps as a metaphor of their own thought or of their own image facing the blank canvas where the painting is going to be executed.
This series has been read as a reflection on the self, and also as a pessimistic view of the individual—an isolated head against a background conveying mystery and restlessness.

Baixeras’ painting is not impulsive; on the contrary, it is underpinned by intellectual analysis, either pictorial or metaphysical, or sometimes permeated by existentialism for, as he himself admits: “my play is as infinite as my death…”

The subject matters depicted in each one of Baixeras’ works are the result of an ongoing reflection on Ernst Gombrich’s essays, the critiques by the
, and the tenets of the
movement. His connection with the Atlántica group, that turned the art scene in Galicia on its head in the 1980s, is seen through his quest for new signs of identity in which the artist combines the ancient tradition of his homeland with what was then brewing both in Europe and in the United States.