Juan Carlos Pereda

VOLVER A MIRAR

Facts become art through love, which unifies them and lifts them to a higher plane of reality; in landscape, this all-embracing love is expressed through light.

Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art, 1949.

Armando Zesatti has endowed landscape painting with a special character: while maintaining continuity with its noble and ancient origins, inherited from the long tradition of that pictorial genre, his work also responds to his desire to belong fully to his own time. For this reason, his eminently Arcadian painting presents Edens and earthly paradises in which dystopian considerations have also found a place, problematizing, if you will, that perfect beauty.

Zesatti’s landscapes have the virtue of transporting us to natural environments, far from the urban world—the place where we might ordinarily encounter his work. In his paintings there is a powerful evocation of nature, filtered through a clear poetic feeling that simultaneously brings us closer to a reality flooded with light—Edenic and silent—in which there is no reference to the passage of time.

In this artist’s painting there are conditions that allow his audience to evoke, in a realistic manner, the virtues and gifts of fragments of the world he has chosen, as occurs in the monumental work titled Rincón del Sureste, 2008 (pp. 42–43), in which, with great talent and sensitivity for capturing light, color, form, and atmosphere, Zesatti recreates the landscape and turns these elements into a gift for the eye.

The breadth and depth of his aesthetic proposal go beyond mere documentary concern, scientific interest, or a purely ecological impulse, transforming his gaze into a visual poem—into a work of art.

In most of Zesatti’s paintings there is an attachment to the forms and colors of the real, associated with a certain classical sensibility, which leads him to emphasize the visual structures underlying observed reality so that, with a crisp drawing, a fine brushstroke, and a search for colors and nuances, he then creates a new form of poetic realism—one that confronts the gaze of photographic reality in order to surpass it and turn it into art. The painter thus unites an exploration of the mystery of artistic creation with a direct encounter with nature.

Up to this point, Zesatti’s works belong to a tradition that, in its historical unfolding, has been academic but also revolutionary, and in his hands it begins to become a distinctive proposal of his own, charged with several of his contemporary concerns. By his own decision, his landscape becomes a beautiful scene that is also dystopia; there, the human figure is only alluded to through the intense gaze implied in the selection of the landscape fragment he chooses to make each canvas the protagonist.

Zesatti’s powerful plasticity is revealed in the discovery of broad horizons—as in Viajando en tren, 2016 (p. 10)—as well as in landscape fragments and their translation into a plastic language, as in the paintings where framings of tree canopies and plants are delineated, which represent the majority of this artist’s works.

Forms, textures, colors, and the possibility of transforming them into artistic forms create a tension between the technical and the spiritual that is revealed, in each fragment of his paintings, to anyone who looks with attention. In Zesatti’s work there exists a virtual threshold contained within the painting itself. Each framing of a landscape poses a question about the perception of a mimetic reality and the complexity of artistic creation: the relationship between observed reality and the work of art, between recreation and the nostalgia of evoked sensations that lie beneath that recreated reality, as shown in Lloviendo en las barrancas, 2010 (p. 52).

Every painter follows powerful inclinations that persist and at the same time transform from one painting to the next. Armando Zesatti tends to paint nature. He creates visions of nature through sectioned landscapes, edited by his gaze from a broader scene, focusing his interests on fragments of those elements his mood selects; those fragments, brought together, constitute the paradisiacal geography of places that could almost be from anywhere in the world.

Zesatti’s art is not only ecological; his gaze, which seeks the uninhabited beauty of his paintings, cannot be reduced to that. Rather, it has the virtue of placing the viewer before those places that seem like fragments of Eden. The painter makes accessible to us the experience of a singularity that would otherwise only be achieved by traveling to distant places. In each scene, Zesatti gives us an experience that occurs without witnesses; each painting is only for each one of us, even as it is also for everyone else.

The painter places before our eyes nature—those cyclopean stones, Pared de piedras, 2010 (pp. 48–49)—trees, plants, rivers, and seas that we have seen before without paying attention, now transformed into an aesthetic reflection that has nevertheless not lost its natural vitality. Zesatti has found in them the secret of a certain perfection, of a contemplative enjoyment that is almost utopian, turned into a landscape that is simultaneously nature and an emotion held in extended suspension—an inquisitive, attentive gaze that invites us to look again (Se está haciendo tarde, 2015 (pp. 28–29)).

In Zesatti’s work there is no pollution, no greenhouse effect, but rather a crisp climate produced by the luminosity of an unprecedented dawn light—new light, unused, virgin. Junta de palmeras, 2016 (p. 12). That light illuminates the gentle, cool winds that have moved the trees, plants, and leaves and have been held still in his scenes, only to then caress our skin as we stand before them.

By this I mean that Zesatti’s painting is not only for the eyes, but for all the senses; his works possess that quality achieved by the most talented artists: the call to other senses, which helps us enjoy these scenes held still, offered to a second gaze—more attentive, more lingering.

Looking at his paintings—those scenes calmed and suspended in time—the wondrous power of synesthesia settles within us, inviting us to hear the murmurs of the sea, to evoke atmospheres, and to feel the temperatures that envelop his landscapes.

In the mornings that unfold in Zesatti’s paintings, the miracle happens beyond the morning island reinvented by the painter, beyond that paradise created in a studio from the memory of a perfect, Edenic nature: the painting provides us with a refuge that opens into a luminous midday of silence, into that fraction of the slow, ceaseless spectacle of the world that the artist has captured for our eyes and offers to our other senses.

Armando Zesatti works by contrasting the fleeting nature of light with its reflection on each fragment of nature, and by a wonder-filled curiosity for the beauty and variety of the world, which he discovers in the whole and in every fragment. He is an artist moved by a double fervor: for visible things and for the craft of representing them, with a complexity—almost like abstract painting—that expresses his ability to fix the movement of a fluid.

His color becomes richer in nuances the more one looks at each canvas. The curious, searching gaze discovers more details than those seen at first, by looking again at nature through art.

When one looks at a painting by Zesatti, one experiences the sensation of having entered it, of being surrounded by something like a magnetic field in which sensations beyond sight occur. For example, in some paintings one hears the subtle murmurs of nature; one perceives the temperatures of those monumental stones that receive the scorching rays of the sun and then the moist sea breeze; the body experiences the warm temperatures of a beach or the temperate and cold temperatures of forests. The experience of viewing a work by this painter will take place, logically, in a gallery, a museum, or the living room of a home, and it is presented to us as an experience of having returned to nature while being in a place alien to it (Horizonte frío, 2010, p. 61).

Zesatti’s work has a double evocative power that grants us a way of looking again. Present yet distant, visible and unreachable, Zesatti’s landscapes invite us—smoothly, slowly—to look again at nature.