Goya's dog

“The ideas of emergence, birth and acceptance are necessarily associated with the accentuated presence of the void”

Most of Saura’s subjects crowd their canvases, their presence emphatic and urgent. The opposite is true of his paintings of Goya’s Dog, where a sense of the surrounding emptiness is accentuated, suggesting the pervasive presence of mystery and the unknown.

Crucifixion

“I have tried to destabilize an image and breathe an air of protest into it [...] I am simply interested in the tragedy of a man — a man and not a God — absurdly nailed to a cross”

Inspired by Velazquez’s painting Christ Crucified (1632), these works are more hypnotic than they are reverential. Saura was fascinated by the way that cruelty can become a point of fixation, and saw the greatest beauty not in the most conventionally beautiful objects and experiences, but in the most intense. The image of the crucifixion, as he repeatedly rendered it, embodies such cruelty and intensity.

Portraits

“Focus on the labyrinth of the face. Invent a new face along the way. Forgetting it first. Then producing blind structures”

Saura’s painterly depictions of the human face function to expose and conceal at once. These works belong to a series he called his Sudarios— Shrouds, in English. They are frenetic, conceptual explorations of the human condition that obscure the sitter’s true appearance with complex psychological depictions.

Auto-da-fe

“The faces that contemplate us, arising from liquid and random technique, speaking of a dual situation born from the sleep of reason.”

The destruction of books is a gravely familiar image for anyone who has lived through a period of political oppression. Though personally deeply politically engaged, Saura directed his work more towards formal challenges. This series, comprising book covers painted with amorphous forms, suggest a kind of rebirth and flourishing of human reason following a period of repression.

Crowds

“In pride of place a shadowy elongated painting made of continuous mobile structures pitted with the gleaming eyes of a beast.”

In the gestural, dynamic painterly language of these works, we see clearly the impact that global art movements like abstract expressionism in America, art informel in France and Gutai in Japan had on Saura’s. We also see allusions to his fascination with imagery from natural science, the crowds resembling both microscopic images of cells and the constellations of the cosmos.

Gallery photography: © Eva Herzog // Credits: Antonio Saura for the reproduction of his works © Succession Antonio Saura / www.antoniosaura.org / VEGAP, Madrid, 2023