Cristino de Vera: Essence & Fugacity

For fifty years Cristino de Vera has produced an impressive work as a painter, as a result of the admirable perseverance that has accompanied him throughout his artistic career, where his extraordinary talent as an artist has been evident and saluted by specialised critics. It is not possible to evaluate the history of painting of the Canary Islands without dedicating several pages to Cristino de Vera. Cristino de Vera (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1931) has readily trodden many different artistic paths that mark the thin and crucial line of memento mori, which makes those who look at his painting not only detect unnamed archaeological traces but also references to Baroque vanitas, Böcklin or Morandi. His oeuvre is therefore a long route crossed by a Macbethlike obsession with death. And a veritable creative universe nourished by unwonted sources revolves around this certainty. His work is an encounter with the vertical memory that nourishes and lives in artistic creation, an existential legacy that he has managed to mature with the quiet, intense concentration of a mystic. This is an adjective that has often been applied to him since his work is born of austerity and poetry, and sustained in a very personal iconography that always leads to a spiritual reflection and that leads to death as the only sure and inevitable course. Although it is true that in his early period, Cristino de Vera cultivated the landscape and drawing and his concerns seemed to lead him in another direction. Cristino de Vera’s long career provides him with a timeless conception from which he dispenses encyclopaedic knowledge in both his lyrico-artistic and his verbal arguments. He cohabits quite naturally with the great masters of thought of universal history and with his realistic worldly experiences that have turned him into a man rich in meaning and sentiment. Cristino has received many awards such as the Gold Medal of Fine Arts and the National Fine Arts Prize in 1998 in recognition of his excellent artistic career. In 1997 he donated a large part of his work to the Canary Government on the sole condition that it should be exhibited for all the inhabitants of the Canaries to see and now here he has given another example of his generosity by donating part of his work to the IVAM so that we can enjoy looking at it in this exhibition. “I consider myself a disciple of Cézanne, but Zurbarán’s painting made a great impression on me when I saw it at the Prado,” says this painter from the Canaries. And the fact is that it is as though he were transfixed by a metaphysic of light, always mysterious, that he has consciously pursued in all his work, taking the experience to its limits in order to reach the most absolute silence. “Many artists have an inclination towards the harmony of silence, which only arrives with death,” confesses De Vera. I think Cristino’s work fills us with light.