In the infinite, we will meet by Norberto M. Ibáñez
The century was about to turn, and Rafa de Corral was already returning from Paris with an exhibition tucked inside his luggage. It was at that moment that we connected, and amid youthful projects, he spoke to me about his artistic work. As I listened to his words over coffee conversations, I discovered that he was a man of ideas rooted in a noble yet robust human architecture of thought. Viewing and feeling his paintings, I came to understand this Basque by birth who settled in Valencia to put down roots near a creative Mediterranean. Nearly twenty years later, without losing track of him during this time, I visited the Alba Cabrera gallery to savor his latest exhibition titled "The Persistence of Emptiness." And there were his same youthful ideas and reflections, but they had been transformed by the veils that time imposes. There were his landscapes, his steel architectures, his misty skies, his dreams, his warm tones, his geometric figures that sought to abstract themselves from reality. Every rationalist construction, every refined line, every brushstroke, every projection of light, every scenography, was imbued with the artist's tremor, with the emotional shakes that Rafa draws from a life he lives with intense independence and absolute generosity. The continuity and upward maturation of his work continue to show the artist's persistent character and seriousness, one that escapes fads or trends. True to himself and confident in his artistic identity, he isolates himself daily in his studio to compose and explore his poetic structures through a complex, disciplined, mathematical creative process.
The narrative of his urban stories is marked by an increasingly refined existentialism that reminds me of that delightful Pirandello play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author." Because in his scenes, what is seen is as important as what is not seen. That's why what we don't glimpse in them, we must interpret, we must imagine. The vastness of his painting, on the verge of the metaphysical, was part of the celebration with which the association of Valencian galleries enthusiastically opened the season last Friday. An artistic framework that illuminates Rafa de Corral's path and spurs him to keep growing to infinity, just like his creative freedom.