Rafa de Corral is one of the painters who have captured the essence of objective drawing, a little big secret that many may know but only a few can harness. It's not about mimicking the visible, delineating its contours, defining volume through light and shadow, imitating textures and surfaces, or accurately drawing perspective. This is just the technique, the craft of the artist. The task is more complex; it's about reconstructing the intrinsic structure and character of things within a new system of visual codes, the artwork, and making it function.
Here, the artist is enjoying this intellectual game that drawing can become, delighting in the deceptions of perspective, reinventing it, putting it to their service, knowing that any world is fictional or dreamed by someone before. Hence, the viewer's sensation of having multiple perspectives and points of view. Starting from a sketch, from a mental map, they create the form and then introduce it into the imaginary pictorial space, making it coexist and interact with the painting, light, color, with these infinite skies and horizons. Here, geometry, which we believe to be rational, objective, and indifferent to our judgments and emotions, unexpectedly carries mystery, drama, and tension.
Enigmatic structures that seem to be constructed at the same time the viewer's gaze travels through the painting. What are they? It depends on us. A strange reincarnation of Egyptian pyramids. An unfinished labyrinth in which you get lost because you can't find its origin. An impossible place that seems more real than our everyday reality. If you look a little longer, you enter inside, and you don't know if, by crossing the boundary, you'll find the playful Wonderland, the paradox on the other side of the mirror, or Tarkovsky's "The Zone" from Stalker. There's a sense of deception, an undetectable trap, but the desire to enter is stronger.
Cold and distant, immaculate and unalterable are the works in gray-blue tones. And warm, human, vulnerable to the passage of time, aging and oxidizing under our gaze, are the reds and ochres. Rafa says that his work is between figuration and abstraction, but even his realism is different; it's magical, dreamlike, psychedelic, but also rational, the strangest and most unreal of them all. And so, emptiness no longer weighs on us so much.
Karina Vadragova