Vicente Colom

Vicente Colom was born in Valencia in 1941. At the early age of fourteen began to work at the printing company founded by Luis Farinetti in 1887, which at that time, under the supervision of Ernest Furió, produced embossed stamps made with steel dies hand-engraved by burin. This activity, which he performed for over ten years, was the element that aroused his interest and admiration for painter-engravers like Rembrandt, Goya and Dürer, who he acknowledges have influenced his work somewhat. In parallel he studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Carlos until 1965, when he went to Paris, where he lived for three years, returning to Spain after the revolutionary events of May 1968. It was in Paris that Colom decided to dedicate himself almost entirely to pen and ink drawing. His many visits to the Musée Guimet, (Musée National des Arts Asiatiques) whose collections contain important examples of traditional Chinese painting, reinforced his objective of achieving the maximum qualities and volumes from black and white, chiaroscuro and drawing. In 1969 he met Federico Robles, director of the Galería Fortuny in Madrid, who introduced him into the artistic world of those years. Colom arrived in a Spain that, after the Stabilisation Plan (1959), had broken away from autarchy, begun economic development and was becoming inundated by the mass media. A year before his arrival, the exhibition Antes del Arte (Before Art) had been held with the aim “of tracing the path that goes from science to art”, and in 1969 Juan Antonio Aguirre succeeded in portraying in his book Arte ultimo the heterogeneous character of the reaction of the “New Generation” against the poetics of Informalism. After living in Asturias for two years, Colom settled in Madrid in 1972, where he shared a studio with Vicente Peris until 1974. That same year, in Munich he met Pamela Shuts, an American dancer with whom he lived for seven years and to whom he owes his series on movement and the human figure: buskers playing in the streets, violinists in action, popular types and especially topics related with dancing. In 1975 he befriended Raúl Chávarri, who supported him and gave him advice about his artistic career. In the late seventies and early eighties, Colom combined Expressionist-style oil and wax painting –nudes and landscapes– with pen and ink drawing. The latter started to take over from then on and was characterised by an accumulation of both drawing outlines and masses delimited in certain areas of the paper while other zones were occupied by a vacuum. Scarecrows, melancholy trousers and jackets, deck chairs and harlequins were his favourite topics. The objects seemed to be floating in a desolate nonexistent atmosphere, conveying a feeling of disquiet and unrest as a clear symptom of the decomposition of the traditional social context in the Spain of that time. Chávarri defined it as “an oasis of images capable of conjuring the unreal, the imaginable and becoming an outpost of thought and emotions that went beyond the limits of the mind”. Vicente Colom always remained independent both of realist trends dealing with everyday topics, such as those addressed by the work of Antonio López or Carmen Laffón, and the hyperrealist fashion imported from Great Britain and the United States and brought into Spain in the seventies by the Chilean Claudio Bravo. He was not interested in Pop art or socio-political criticism either. Without a doubt, conserving his independence has been one of the reasons why Colom has always combined his artistic career with his work as a decorator and antique dealer. For him decoration is a collage, an interplay of combination and eclectic combinations, while drawing leads him to controlled and reasoned creativity. Colom draws from life. His medium is the pen and this allows no corrections and requires painstaking attention; the artist’s vision is materialised without any possibility of retreat. Colom is enthusiastic about detail, about the finish of the drawing “because realism allows him to speculate about the poeticism of things”. He goes back over his themes again and again after long periods of rest. His series are different ways of seeing and observing the same object or sequence. An example of this is when he went back to urban architecture as a theme the mid eighties, and today, when he has returned to the landscape, the Mediterranean countryside, delving into details if its vegetation, the key theme of the current exhibition. Colom prefers the light of evening rather than that of midday, that of cloudy days rather than that of bright sunny days. This is the time when contrasts and chiaroscuro can be best observed in nature and pen and ink permits the elaboration of tonal gradations made by an interweave of lines and an uninterrupted, uniform line rhythmically applied. But his landscapes are not altogether real: the elements that form them have been lined up and isolated by means of detail. In the words of Román de la Calle, Colom “…simulates and constructs –from familiar and everyday images– a whole imaginary universe, in the double sense of a universe made up of images and a universe fashioned by the flight of the imagination”.