Vicente Ameztoy

(San Sebastián, 1946 ─ 2001)

Untitled

ca. 1972

oil on canvas

54 x 65 cm

Inv. no. P03084

BBVA Collection Spain


The works of Vicente Ameztoy, his paintings, boxes and dolls, are the result of combining Basque sentiments, roots and natural environs with magic, illusion and mirage. Ameztoy painted slowly and meticulously. However, his realist figuration plays with perception, creating contradictions and using an ironical language that straddled truth and falsehood. He generally worked with oil paint, using it sparingly and drily, with soft glazes that would later condition the preservation and restoration of his paintings.

In March 1973, the artist had a solo show at Galería El Pez (San Sebastian) consisting of 38 oil paintings—landscapes which reversed the position of sky and earth. The subject matter of this Untitled piece, dated by Javier Viar (who directed the Museo de Bellas Artes of Bilbao from 2002 to 2017), allows us to assign it to the body of work resulting from that line of research.

That same month of March, coinciding with the exhibition opening, Ameztoy gave several interviews to local media, in which he explained that he had temporarily abandoned portraiture to focus entirely on landscape, treating it like a character. In an interview with the Unidad newspaper (9/3/1973) he claimed that if his landscapes are soothing it is because they are inspired by the place where he lived: in 1970 he and his family had moved to Etxe-Ondo (Villabona, Guipuzcoa), a manor house in a peaceful setting which he described as “paradisiacal,” adding that although his landscapes are the outcome of his observation of nature, his personal impressions interfere and provoke alterations, unique interactions between sky and earth, with the boundaries blurred due to the fog that flows between the two planes. The artist brought those reflections to his studio, avoiding painting from life in order to generate a falsified reality and to imagine other possible realities.

In this painting, a fragment of the mountain seems to have broken off and to float freely in the sky. There is a clean cut: two lines descending from the sky cutting through the land like two straight rivers converging at one point. Ameztoy’s work is undergirded by a line of research in which geometric figures penetrate the organicity of the terrain. Contextually speaking, those incursions can be explained by the rise of
in the 1970s, with artists like Christo (1935-2020), whose large tarpaulin wrappings irrupted in the wild landscape. In the case of Ameztoy, he adds geometric blocks to the forest, doing so quietly, with restraint, but at the same time performing a hard cut that breaks with the optical illusion of his realism. The insertion of a straight construction into the organic is a by-product of listening to his surrounding nature, of the attention he pays to stillness, to the passing of the clouds and reflections on lakes.