Ignacio Pinazo at IVAM’s Collection

Pinazo’s abundant and plural creation can mislead a historian who approaches it without taking a linear view of 19th century painting, unaware of the contradictory heterogeneous art of that century. On occasions, two different artistic profiles of Pinazo have been proposed: one as the author of realistic, rather academic painting, bowing to the demands of a clientele with conventional tastes who could identify with his historical paintings and portraits, and the other, which presents him as a modern avant-garde painter who produced sketchy paintings based on free, anti-academicist daubs, which is the profile that reveals to us the real artist, close to the tastes of the present day. However, in spite of the fact that this type of painting is more attractive to us today, we must see these realities as two sides of the same coin, which cannot be separated from each other; they stem from the same root and grow side by side enriching each other with their experiences, although later the artist, as a result of his own vital dynamics and character, feels more identified with the practice of that other rapid-stroke painting where his ideas about painterly language come to the fore. Since the latter is the predominant trend in the pieces in collection of the IVAM. Pinazo almost always bases his works on a subject, a visual experience, an ordinary everyday event, but, unlike his Valencian contemporaries, especially those of the same generation, he can transcend the anecdote to approach the limits of pure painting recreated in its own substance and even arrive at the verge of abstraction, although he never cuts the thread that establishes a relationship with the concrete world. His formal and narrative peculiarities are linked. Pinazo breaks away from the hierarchy of the arts by revitalising the value of formats and techniques. His painting is a continuum that transports the spectator to a universe filled with sensations that for the artist constitute the path to knowledge. Pinazo cannot be described as a split personality, but as an author of integrated realities, an artist that it is difficult to classify, who cultivated all sorts of genres in painting and fought to remain independent in his retreat in Godella, where his home is now a museum.