PAST EXHIBITION






Walls of rain
…the most profound poet discovers the living water, the water that is reborn out of itself, the water that does not change, the water that marks its images with its indelible sign, the water that is an organ of the world, the food of current phenomena, the vegetative element, the element that polishes, the body of tears.
Gaston Bachelard
For the Greeks, poiesis was action, creation, making, it was the making of beauty… in fact, it is one of the words they used to define art. Over the centuries, poetry became a branch of literature, of writing. However, the poetic dimension is not its exclusive heritage.
In the quotation with which we begin this text, it is necessary to replace poet with painter in order to approach this exhibition of Vicent Machí’s most recent works with certainty.
Water continues to be the material element with which Vicent Machí has built his unique pictorial architectures, and I say architectures thinking of those primitive and original constructions (stilt houses) or of that magical city that is Venice, because on the calm waters there are also dreams and they activate the imagination.
Richard Wollheim, in his book Painting as Art, introduced a concept that I have never stopped thinking about: “seeing as”. A kind of perceptual pre-reading of a pictorial surface based on its lines, patches of colour, textures, figure-ground relationships, a human capacity that precedes interpretation. A concept that years later evolved into “seeing in”, the visualisation of an object on a surface, influencing the radical duality of painting: material and representational. This double game also works in abstract, non-figurative painting, and it does so in a much deeper way, creating an inner connection: on the part of the artist (expressive) and on the part of the viewer (emotional, persuasive, experiential).
These paintings evoke numerous dualities: verticality and horizontality, gesture and geometry, chance and control, line and spot, solidity and transparency, water and earth. During the visit to the studio and the subsequent post-photographic reflections, I could not stop seeing in these paintings the intense memory of several trips to Italian cities: the aforementioned Venice, the unforgettable Florence or the incomparable Rome. The memory not of works of art, but of the countless walls of so many buildings, repainted and worn by rain, sun and wind. In these paintings I can smell the earth in the field and the asphalt when the water in the puddles dries up, I can see time stopped, time lost between the pages of Proust…
To return to Bachelard, imaginary water appears to us as the element of transactions, as the fundamental scheme of mixtures. And the fundamental mixture is the combination of water and earth, the true type of mixture for the material imagination. Machí’s painting is the unitary integration of pigment and binder, of earth and water, of matter and image, of matter and action, of matter and evocation. These paths of water (again the earth) lead us to an infinite territory where water flows rhythmically everywhere, appearing to us as a total being, endowed with body and soul, a voice with a thousand sounds, a face with a thousand masks.
Juan Bautista Peiró
Polytechnic University of Valencia