Rafa de Corral's Inner Landscape

 

Rafa de Corral is an easy-going, generous and lovable person. As an artist, he is responsible for an admirable collection of paintings which now, more than ever, shows itself as round and mature. Rafa’s generous work stimulates our sensitivity and imagination so as to allow us perceive our own inner vibrations. All we need is to accept the artist’s invitation and let our souls guide us.

All through his career as a painter, Rafa de Corral has shown his preference for the city as a major motif in his artistic production. Rafa’s city was a very particular one, with absolute absence of citizens. It was a contemporary city with very recognizable locations, buildings and urban furniture; a city whose abundantly cloudy skies took us to the origins of the artist’s place of birth and which reinforced the restlessness and sinister atmosphere of the landscape to make us reflect and experience the loneliness of the passage of time in our urban environment.

 

Sobre su obra



Now, Rafa’s city is undressing itself by getting rid of formal elements for the sake of austerity and close secrecy. It is still vibrant and brims over energy, but the city has become a different scenario, a more concrete one which, at the same time, has fused naturally with the essence of our time: the city is not limited or enclosed anymore, but it is integrated into and belongs to everything else. Rafa’s compositions show special emphasis on the horizon line which separates figure from background, where the first is made up of robust sculpture-like buildings of raw geometry, while the second is made up of perfect timeless skies strongly dependent on colour and, again, geometry.

The evident evolution in his work results into sober magnificent scenes of deceiving motionlessness which, actually, hide in themselves an inner landscape where something is about to burst out.

Because of all that, the tension between opposites is omnipresent in Rafa’s paintings, and it makes our awareness of time itself, which passes by irreparably and inevitably, obvious. As a consequence, we can describe Rafa’s production as full of universal concepts about the passage of time which we can appreciate both when we look at his paintings as whole entities and when we look into minute details. These details can, as a matter of fact, reveal themselves as expression of a second work within the main one, which account for still a further reason for us to stop and enjoy the work of this talented artist.
 

 

Obra de Rafa de Corral

Those who know Rafa de Corral or his work know intuitively if not for sure that he works with both his head and his heart, with both careful technique and unleashed passion. This is his greatness, which we can see in his paintings: emotion and strategy are balanced out to perfection, perceptible in his master use of colours and shapes to create harmonious almost photographic frames. Rafa’s painted space, unreal as it is, is absolutely able to let us recognize our own imagery, may it be a memory brought back from the future, may it be a dream scenario or a nightmare landscape, perhaps an abandoned place about to be born again, well thought and invented buildings. In any case, his landscapes are honest, complex and, above all, open to everyone’s eyes to differently interpret them.

Elena Manteiga
Bacherlor of Arts

 

Sobre la obra de Rafa de Corral

My job is a game, a very serious game”

(M.C. Escher)

 

Fabulous happening between a human being and a prehistoric frog

The frog mysteriously got to the feet of the human, who put it in a fish tank and took care of its living needs. And so time passed by, everything in apparent harmony.

 

One night, the frog secretly left its tank, and the man didn't have to take care of it anymore. And time kept on passing by; with kind harmony, life went on. The man never knew where and why the frog had gone, and that was a lot of questions indeed, since he had never learnt why it had arrived in the first place either. It just happened out of the blue, as it frequently happens in fables, even if this one is a real story.

(Anonymous)