Germaine Gómez Haro

MELODÍAS DEL VIENTO. 2016

Nothing is less real than realism.
Georgia O’Keeffe

In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder recounts how the celebrated painter Zeuxis depicted grapes with such realism that birds approached to peck at them. Artists throughout all periods have been interested in grasping reality, whether by radically altering it or by reproducing it with fidelity. Realism, beyond being a concept or a style, is a method of representation that defines the attempt to recreate visible reality with the greatest possible closeness to nature. As Pliny the Elder recorded, since Antiquity there have been tendencies described as realist. And as centuries passed, we have been left with countless examples of painters who bequeathed masterpieces of faithful recreations of nature. But what does it mean today, in the midst of the twenty-first century, to reproduce the natural world with precision in painting?

With the advent of photography, the end of painting was predicted—above all, the end of landscape and portrait painting. Threatened by the growing influence of photography, the French Romantic painter Paul Delaroche famously declared: “From today, painting is dead.” And until a few years ago, despite the revitalization brought about by the avant-gardes and the development of new trends—among them New Realism and Hyperrealism—the burial of painting continued to be foretold. What a grave mistake. Painting has never died, and today it stands out with renewed vigor within the polyphonic mosaic of alternative arts.

Standing before the canvases of Armando Zesatti, one can affirm that painting is more alive than ever. A self-taught artist, his trajectory is an example of astonishing dedication that reflects a deep passion for the craft. Exceptionally gifted in drawing, his first formal foray into painting focused on equestrian subjects, through which he became known and received unexpected acclaim. But he soon realized that the human or animal figure was not his true path. Landscape attracted him viscerally, and for the past two decades he has devoted himself fully to exploring nature in its most varied manifestations.

It has always drawn my attention that in our country, despite the great biodiversity we possess, the genre of landscape painting is currently almost in disuse. In the nineteenth century, José María Velasco emerged as the great painter of rural Mexican beauty, alongside the traveling artists who documented our land with a documentary vocation: Daniel Thomas Egerton, Johann Moritz Rugendas, Edouard Pingret, Claudio Linati, Jean-Baptiste Louis Baron Gros, Federico Waldeck, among others. Within the broad panorama of the first half of the twentieth century, virtually all artists incorporated landscape in one way or another into their pictorial lexicon, but few devoted themselves entirely to the genre. Among these were Joaquín Clausell, Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl), and later Feliciano Peña, Amador Lugo, Nicolás Moreno, and Luis Nishizawa. Only a handful of Mexican painters today stand out in landscape painting approached from a fully contemporary formal perspective. I think of Pedro Diego Alvarado and, of course, Armando Zesatti.

In Zesatti’s work, the perception of landscape is first registered through photography. The perfect framing, the perfect light, the perfect proximity. But it is in the passage from photograph to canvas where the miracle of his art takes place. It is there that passion intervenes to give life to the still image of the photograph. For Zesatti’s paintings are alive and express movement, even if it is a suspended movement. We sense the dew drops on smooth leaves about to slide and fall; we perceive branches flirting with the wind, on the verge of losing their leaves; we intuit the eruption of waves about to dissolve themselves. His landscape scenes are intimate, because they make us feel as though we are inside the painting.

The works gathered in this exhibition are—mostly—the result of his production over the past three years and coincide with his stay in Valencia, Spain, where he has lived during this period. As in previous exhibitions, one can appreciate the freedom and mastery with which he handles the most diverse landscapes: exuberant tropical plants that exude sensuality; lush trees covered in dense foliage or stripped bare, their nakedness exposed with elegance; the scenographic monumentality of rock formations that recall their millennial existence. The element that has occupied his attention most recently is water—but no longer the still waters of mangroves or streams. Instead, we now encounter, with fascination, scenes of seas and beaches that transport us from the Pacific to the Mediterranean through shifts in light and atmosphere. The intensity of the sun in both latitudes is diametrically opposed, and Zesatti captures it and brings it to the canvas through a new combination in his palette.

Lucha de corrientes evokes a frozen instant in which waves swirl with such force that an explosion of foam seems about to burst from the canvas and splash us. An infinite series of whites sparkles in that foam, tinged with faint brushstrokes of barely perceptible pinks and violets. In Punta rocosa, balance and harmony transport us to an idyllic world, to the Arcadian paradise that only great painting can restore to us.

There are artists, such as Picasso, who flee from a defined style: “I move too much, I change place too much (…) that is why I have no style,” said the Málaga-born artist, whose vast body of work traversed every imaginable style without adhering to a single one. Zesatti functions in the opposite direction. From his beginnings, he chose to define a personal and fully recognizable style that, with great determination and a certain degree of obsession, he has developed gradually, always seeking perfection in his pictorial expression. His paintings convey the serenity of one who ventures into a tropical forest or sits calmly to contemplate the sea. In his recent works, the sway of the waves composes a delicate music that travels through time and space, carried by the melodies of the wind. The intrinsic rhythm of nature produces its own music. Armando Zesatti composes the melodies of the wind with light and color.

Germaine Gómez Haro