Juan Carlos Pereda

LOS PRODIGIOS DEL AGUA (2006)

In many Western utopias, the idea of a garden lies at their core. And this idea promotes the belief that within Arcadian, Edenic nature, humankind was once happy and will be so again. That paradise also consistently includes a river, a lake, or the sea itself; in other words, water is strongly associated with this idea.

Such a promise is offered to us by this artist through his striking landscape paintings, or fragments of them, with which the present exhibition welcomes us.

Landscape painting is also imbued with the fullness of an ethical message through which we are taught the basis of humanity’s inevitable relationship with the world; we are told that life is not worth living without a hope or utopian dream, and we are promised that somewhere an Eden awaits us—a garden in which all difficulties are overcome. If the viewer looks closely at the paintings of Armando Zesatti, they will find that colors, forms, plants, trees, trunks and leaves, drops of dew or mist first remind us and then promise us that at some point we were, or will be, happy in our relationship with nature.

In his new paintings, Armando Zesatti continues to virtuously represent this varied nature, whose common denominator is an Edenic vision of the landscape. However, these works introduce as an innovation various representations of the element of water.

Through landscape painting, humankind has sought to approach nature in order to recreate it, and in contemplating those paradises hanging on the wall, one has felt oneself an artist, or experienced a sense of fulfillment, or felt the call of nature.

Throughout the history of art, landscape painting has represented the strong impulse to faithfully transcribe natural motifs. At a certain point, artists chose to cultivate landscapes of a symbolic order, in which elements of nature were used as bearers of ideas: landscape as country in a process of national individualization; landscape as a synonym of the sublime. Modern landscape avoids rationalization and gives plastic form to the longing for a virginal state in which nature is not manipulated by humankind.

Here, then, is the concise history of landscape painting, which Zesatti has synthesized and poured into each of his canvases. He looks at the great Western tradition from the present, inserts himself within it, and projects it into the future with clear signs of endurance and transcendence.

Armando Zesatti has renounced the garden in order to paint fragments of nature where no human order prevails. His garden has been transformed into jungle, flora, wilderness, site, spring, lake, or swamp—places that, paradoxically, are so close at hand that we have allowed them to go unnoticed.

With enormous skill, meticulous attention, and visible love for his craft, he has recreated the rough textures of a trunk, the graffiti-like patterns of ivy clinging to bark, the solid form of a stone, the reflection of flowing water. All of this loses the insignificance it may have in everyday life to become a privileged object, full of beauty and harmony, a point of reflection that invites us to evoke the mystery of life, the poetry that emanates from nature, or simply to awaken in each viewer a feeling of fulfillment before the simple perfection of nature.

Zesatti has brought before our eyes the landscape, the environment, the atmosphere, the spirit of the place he has chosen to share with the public, and he does so with singular ability.

In each of his paintings, an integral expression of technical mastery, chromatic richness, and virtuosic execution is evident, but also wonder, questioning, and a profound delight in nature. He has made nature an object of contemplation, almost of enchantment, and its transcription does not merely become a pictorial fragment but a setting in which the natural environment redeems the dehumanization of urban space. The artist has sought to consider the history of the relationship between humankind and nature from a perspective in which the individual never appears, nor the destructive effects of human intervention. He shows us that nature, simple and straightforward, can offer us genuine aesthetic pleasure.

From Zesatti’s patient and profound work emerge scenes that, close to photographic verisimilitude, reveal themselves to our gaze as freshly dawned landscapes, invented a moment ago by a generous god, bearing something of that magical Eden we long for.

Everything in Zesatti’s painting—the foliage, the river, the stones, the trunks, and the forests—comes from elsewhere and moves toward a destination we must imagine, but which for now is here, on the wall, inviting nature into the space of our home or gallery office. There is a refined and subtle hedonism provided by the light that illuminates the Arcadia of each of the artist’s works.

This essential fluidity of Zesatti’s painting is based on patient and profound labor. In each scene there is a background, an atmosphere, and an unparalleled texture. Everything flows, appears alive and pulsating, yet each thing, each moment, also reveals a sediment of centuries, an immemorial density.

Through his paintings, it can be said that Zesatti perceives the passage of time in changes of light—an element of utmost importance in the development of his work—since the painter works entirely by day until natural light fades. The paintings that make up this exhibition, as well as the rest of his production, testify to the immense discipline an artist must develop to reach the degree of meticulousness this creator possesses. It is enough to look closely at any work to appreciate its almost obsessive perfection, and also the great love with which each canvas is made; the brushstroke is precise, clear, confident, and, depending on the case, short and energetic or long and serenely languid. All are harmonious and rhythmic, all aimed at achieving precise intentions within the representation of nature.

In this group of works, one can observe an element of novelty in the artist’s painting that involves great technical difficulty in its representation, but which he has mastered with the same skill with which he depicts the other elements he paints. I am referring to water.

The first painting I wish to refer to individually is El Charco (The Puddle), in which the stature of the artist is evident in the way he gives soul to mud, revealing a hidden beauty in an otherwise unpleasant subject such as a swamp of stagnant waters, which Zesatti nevertheless transforms into a mirror that intensely reflects the sky.

In the paintings La Enramada, Sayulita, and Atardecer, water plays a central role. The artist has set himself the challenge of capturing the relationship between flowing water and stones—an interaction in which light may be the most important element. In La Enramada, water covers stones that, swept by the current, become an inconstant mirror of tree branches, perceived only through the intention of color expressed in green brushstrokes. The rocks emerging from the diminished flow demonstrate the artist’s talent for representing textures, dampness, atmospheres, and even temperatures. Atardecer is perhaps the most abstract of the canvases in this group, as there is no descriptive reference other than the light reflected on the gentle waves of the sea. In these works, light is the element through which the difficult illusion of moving water is generated in the viewer. The movement of the liquid presents a greater technical challenge, which the painter has overcome to achieve a verisimilitude that could be described as hyperrealistic.

A canvas that powerfully draws attention for its remarkable evocation of temperatures, humidity, and textures is Secretos, in which countless shades of green alternate with delicate grays and browns to achieve the exact depiction of a fleeting glimpse into the heart of a torrid forest.

Zesatti has endowed the landscape not only with a soul but has also humanized it. In Alma Gemela, he seems to give the tropical jungle a narcissistic quality, depicting a landscape that discovers its beauty when reflected in water; in this narrative, the consequence of the mirror’s reflection is the revelation of a process of gradual death, but also of regeneration. The theme appears again in a more intimate way in Estanque, where the same phenomenon occurs but is described with a different type of plants and a more concentrated vision, intensifying the scene’s meaning.

A clear-water pond provides the setting for circular lily leaves just beginning to bloom. Nevertheless, it can be inferred that the central theme is the recreation of the lake itself. It is interesting to observe how the artist conveys the sense of space occupied by translucent water, which in its stillness creates a virtually abstract space.

The dramatic contrasts that can exist in nature are convincingly and revealingly synthesized in the canvas La Ramona, where the smoothness, freshness, and fragility of plants with tiny leaves—accentuating even more the delicacy of the foliage—are set against the rough texture of an ancient trunk. The strength, but also the serene beauty with which Armando Zesatti depicts the scene, is almost moving.

Poetic imagination is also part of the painter’s material, and through it he transforms the ghostly trunks of trees into hammocks with the most paradisiacal view imaginable. The composition, resolved in three planes, reaffirms the artist’s stance toward nature: land, sea, and sky exist for the viewer’s enjoyment and delight.

Painting as a mirror of the world is the theme of A Orillas del Río, a generously scaled work in which the painter clearly expresses his objectivity toward the landscape. In this canvas, he details nature in its life cycles and places water—though not in a leading role—as a source of life. It is interesting how the artist incorporates withered leaves to enhance both the truth and the beauty of the scene, where light becomes the condition that makes the miracle of life visible.

A certain nostalgia may be inspired by the landscapes Mesquitic I and II, both adorned with dry reeds of yellowish tones. The pleasing contrast between such opposing yet perfectly complementary colors as the blue of the water and the sepia of the dry plants provokes that gentle feeling, which soon dissipates into the horizon that opens generously in the canvases, giving freedom of flight to the gaze.

With photographic verisimilitude—yet far removed from the cold objectivity characteristic of such records—we find the artist’s delicate intention to express the union of a palm and a flower not as an anecdote but as a symbol in the magnificent painting Abrazo. Could this canvas reflect the emotion that now envelops him as he stands on the verge of marriage?

In his tropical forest landscapes, a dense, almost impenetrable undergrowth develops. The saturation of foliage, as seen in Delirios, acquires a baroque quality that translates into a horror vacui. Thus, this intricate scene is composed of delirious vegetation: terrestrial, aquatic, and virtual—the latter existing only in its reflection in the water—yet greatly contributing to saturating the canvas’s surface with vegetation.

As a counterpoint to the horizon of moist earth and tropical temperature, the exhibition features an enormous palm that rises majestically, silhouetted against an intensely blue sky. The powerful figure of the yucca has not been depicted in its entirety, but perhaps it is this fragmentation that grants it a monumentality that becomes a kind of vegetal galaxy, where comets of intense green light possess tails of dried leaves.

Flowing water is once again addressed as the base and foreground in Manantial, a painting in which the artist fully displays his abilities, and in which light and space are the conditions that allow nature to reveal itself in all its splendor. The harmony with which the green tones are arranged in this scene can only come from meticulous observation of nature.

Water is also invoked in this exhibition as a gift from the sky—the life-giving rain that moistens and revitalizes, giving nature new greens. This event is recorded in Temporada de lluvias, a work of great technical merit and subtle significance.

The exhibition concludes with a canvas of a peculiar theme titled Piscis, which presents water as a realm of life. Here, the beautiful distortions experienced by the reflections of various fish of different sizes and colors when sunlight comes into contact with them are meticulously detailed. The underwater landscape once again leads us to another reality, one that reveals to us the magic of art.

Technically, Zesatti’s paintings are modern in character. Considering himself self-taught, he has achieved a refined technique that feels highly contemporary. Like painters of notable relevance such as David Hockney or Alex Katz, Armando Zesatti applies paint without mixing colors. His brushstrokes are smooth and flat, with greater or lesser density of paint. He does not apply overlapping layers of pigment, but instead defines zones of color that, seen up close, resemble a kind of puzzle, and from a distance become impeccable scenes of reality. It is striking how he can recreate both rough textures and others of great smoothness and freshness, and how sunlight is reflected in them with such veracity, convincingly suggesting both moisture and dryness. It is also striking how he makes a stream of water flow or gives movement to a tree branch, creating, brushstroke by brushstroke, a true painted universe.

In many areas of Zesatti’s paintings, drawing emerges on the pictorial surface to delineate objects such as leaves, stones, fragments of trunk, and branches, achieving a persuasiveness that makes his canvases resemble windows opening onto a garden, a jungle, a lake, or a river.

The work of Armando Zesatti is, in sum, a series of lived experiences fixed in fragments of landscapes, expressed through colors and forms that go beyond the moment and seek to endure for all time.