Eduardo Arroyo

In this new retrospective exhibition, Eduardo Arroyo, one of the greatest of contemporary Spanish artists, presents his last ten years’ work. A period of incessant intensity and international recognition of his work. In the thirty-one paintings and twenty-two sculptures it comprises, we can follow the evolution of this brilliant artist from the important show at the Museo Reina Sofía in 1998 to his last solo exhibition, Anónimos Sominona. The great weight of the sculpture is a very meaningful detail. Although Arroyo has always felt tempted, as a result of his pugilistic fight with picture –with the plane and paint– by the transition to volume, it is in the last ten years, perhaps since he set up his sculptor’s studio in Robles de Laciana, that Arroyo has started working on stone, fashioning these rocks that often look like objets trouvés, to extract from them, or add to them, it does not matter which, the figure or story –the myth, the totem –that he needs in order to tell a tale. Thus, the series called Unicornio de Laciana (Laciana Unicorn) or the Novia de Muxiven (Muxiven Bride) will make us believe in an ancient, mythical pantheon of his own located in the mountains of León. Because Arroyo’s sculpture and painting are both literary, and that is watertight praise. Literary in the sense that he is interested in the contents and considers a work loaded with meanings. The artist appropriates tradition, myths and emblems in order to tell his own story directly or ambiguously related to the present. And he does so with always-complex plastic metaphors, whose themes have evolved little by little. Now it will be European stories, going from fairy tales to patristic literature, from mysticism to popular icons, with very precise leitmotifs. Images like recurrent words, like recurrent preoccupations, that are indirectly linked to the metaphorical nucleus of his earlier oeuvre. The new series, Fantômas, is an example of appropriation of a theme and also of supports he has used before –paintings about paintings– often tackled in the painter’s most recognisable style. An exhibition that shows us the vitality and depth of one of our most universal artists. And his necessary, essential reflection, which, as Gaston Bachelard expects of art, “disturbs allowing no truce for reason”.