The Metaphysics of the Urban. Jaime Millas Covas.

For reasons that are not relevant, I closely followed the early steps of the Bilbao-born painter Rafa de Corral, and now, several years later, I have the aesthetic and intellectual fortune of being able to contemplate his latest exhibition presented at the College of Architects of Valencia. From the outset, I confess that I have been struck by the remarkable coherence of his creations developed over all this time, the fidelity to a poetics that began rooted in the asphalt of the city we walk on every day, and the maturity, in short, of an artist with a career who, based in Valencia, knows how to take one step further in each exhibition from the apparent uninhabited and faceless city he wanted to depict when he offered his first solo exhibitions in the late '90s.

As I write this commentary, I have a small-format painting in front of me, depicting an unnamed street in an unnamed city, a small street that could be in Montmartre, El Carmen, or the Madrid of the Habsburgs. It doesn't matter, but its image shows love and care for that urban space, a dimly lit alley, its balconies adorned with potted plants, its small trees casting shadows. No one inhabits it, but it is inhabited. I sense that at this beginning of his journey, the painter wants to be above all an observer, an analyst, respectful but filled with questions. Since he's just starting, he doesn't want to make judgments, and as he knows how to paint, he behaves like an academic and realistic painter, an apparent reproducer of urban reality. He observed the city from the window, from the terraces, from the railway tracks, from the sidewalks. A cautious observer who wanted to take it step by step.

And it is precisely these origins that have allowed Rafa de Corral to now conduct himself with technical maturity and freedom of aesthetic discourse, evident in the Valencia exhibition. Because his soul and body have gone through an entire creative process that allows him to brilliantly display the architectural interior, the technical structures, the geometric forms hidden by the old buildings in that peaceful and conventional small painting. Furthermore, the painter continues to project his forms onto the city, but the city is increasingly within him; he doesn't need to look at it or observe it. He shows a constant desire to recreate metaphysical spaces, yet akin to possible and known spaces, linked to forms and perspectives that mark the history of painting. I believe that the chosen support of plans and designs of an architectural project on crumpled cardboard, in this case, is a mere pretext to make his forms soar, to suspend them, if possible, from vast skies, from enigmatic horizons. In this exhibition, the paintings are still flat, but their perspectives are demanding to leave the canvas and hang from the ceiling.

 

Forma IX
Estructura IX

 

The evocations suggested by his compositions unintentionally harken back to the grandeur of the Veles i Vents building, designed by architect David Chipperfield, in the new marina of our city's port. A building with magnificent perspectives, conceived as monumental planes that slide over one another to create grandstands, terraces, balconies, shaded areas from which to watch nautical competitions. The bold forms, in ochres, blacks, and grays, in his paintings with sometimes impossible perspectives, evoke his Basque imagination, in which Chillida has perforated metal to extract air, soul, and emotion, much like someone constructs a millennia-old feat from stone or tree trunks. And the skies are the most poetic part of his compositions, Mediterranean skies that not only accompany the sun but also express storms, heavy rainfall, gales, hail, early morning, evening, chilly nights.

I read in the exhibition catalog that Rafa presented in the Renfe exhibition hall under the title "Urban Fragments": "an observer interested in discovering the lines, volumes, and industrial elements that make up the city. He looks from terraces to outline the horizon of antennas before merging with the immense sky." What I wrote a few years ago allows me to add now: Rafa no longer looks at the city; his observation seems small to him because he is within himself. The lack of a project when starting a pictorial career is compensated for with the ability to observe, but when maturity is reached, observation is replaced by creation, intuition, exploration, and impulses to reach the unknown using the techniques one masters.