En cada visita ha ganado un sólido prestigio por la calidad de una pintura cuyo refinamiento es solo comparable a la de Tilsa y a la de Bruno Zeppilli, el ilustrado discípilo de la artista. Sin embargo, a diferencia de los referentes mencionados, la pintura de Peschiera no es narrativa, no cuenta una historia y apenas sugiere edificios medievales, cuencos o mantos donde la geometría es apenas un pretexto para crear formas que se disuelven con la pintura.

Sé del largo proceso que ha llevado al artista para hacer esta exposición. Son años de llenar la superficie con infinidad de minúsculas pinceladas, alargadas como las de antaño y puntillistas hoy, utilizando recursos posimpresionistas, para hacer una obra sin tiempo, fuera de todo encasillamiento.

La obra de Peschiera es deslumbrante y a la vez contradictoria. Hay una espiritualidad producto de la luz que proviene de los fondos y a la vez encuentro en ella un erotismo en esa piel tan delicadamente trabajada, hecha de una manera tan meticulosa, con tanta persistencia que solo el deseo de lo absoluto permitiría lograr.

Estos cuadros elaborados con infinita dedicación constituyen un acto de fé en la pintura. Nunce he visto en el Perú a un artista que haya logrado decir tanto con esa austeridad que predomina en la mejor exposición que haya visto en el presente año. El montaje coadyuva a estos propósitos. Las salas negras, las luces puntuales sobre cada cuadro – que aparenta flotar – y todo el sentido del espacio hacen de la visita al ICPNA una experiencia espiritual.

Ricardo Wiesse se encarga de analizarlo mejor cuando sostiene que las inquietudes intelectuales del pintor lo llevaron a « familiarizarse con la letras modernas tanto como con los textos de los Primeros  Padres de la Iglesia y a incursionar temporalmente en monasterios cistercienses para vivir en carne propia la austeridad cotidiana de sus ocupantes. Sus temas pictóricos testimonian fidedignamente la misma renuncia radical y la aproximación respetuosa a la regla estricta de estos renunciantes, en las antípodas del hedonismo descabezado que distrae y somete al profano común y corriente».

Luis Lama

J’ai vu cette exposition à plusieurs reprises et relu le texte introductif que j’avais rédigé il y a près d’un an ; je confirme aujourd’hui chacune de mes affirmations. Seuls des regards silencieux et respectueux trouvent ici leur place, face à des espaces qui ont cessé d’être profanes pour nous relier à une autre dimension, où règne le silence. Bien que les adjectifs, constructions intellectuelles, explications ou récits préalables y soient superflus, je tenterai néanmoins de rendre compte de mes impressions.

Le peintre a déversé sa vie dans ces œuvres. Devant chacune de ces pièces, nous reconnaissons non seulement les heures consacrées au travail manuel, mais aussi l’engagement profond envers les valeurs et les idéaux qui les sous-tendent.

Ces peintures ne sont pas de simples surfaces éblouissantes : ce sont des organismes vivants qui palpitent, vibrent, et se célèbrent comme des conquêtes d’un contrôle soutenu sur toute l’étendue de leurs rectangles. L’exécutant n’a négligé aucun centimètre carré, à l’image du pianiste qui interprète parfaitement sa partition, tant sur le plan formel qu’expressif, de la première à la dernière note. La sensation qui imprègne le spectateur lorsqu’il quitte cette salle peut se résumer, sans exagération, par les mots de mon ami Raúl Gutiérrez : « C’est miraculeux. »

Le contraste entre la réalité chaotique et anomique de notre présent planétaire et les œuvres ici exposées ne pourrait être plus frappant. Du côté du « réel », tout semble s’effondrer, régresser, se dissoudre dans une obscurité qui nous ramène à l’indifférenciation et engendre de sombres pressentiments. Fragiles comme des châteaux de cartes, nos institutions sociales s’écroulent sans qu’aucun nouvel horizon ne se dessine, étouffées par la cupidité et l’arbitraire qui minent notre histoire depuis des siècles. Privés de repères, avec une sphère politique capturée par une corruption généralisée et une nature blessée jusqu’à son démembrement, nous avançons droit vers l’abîme.

Au milieu de ce chaos, Peschiera a rassemblé ses peintures et a érigé, avec elles, une zone libérée, intacte, qui tient à distance les forces de dissolution.

Peinte d’un violet sombre et impeccablement agencée, cette salle devient un noyau de résistance déclaré contre le désespoir. Son créateur a mené une lutte prolongée contre les conventions sociales, culturelles et artistiques qui l’entourent. Accroché à son propre mât, il a approfondi des voies qu’il avait esquissées il y a des décennies, se dépouillant de tout objet symbolique autre que le mur.

Ses « mantos » témoignent d’un profond respect pour les paysages de ce monde, exaltés par la mémoire de lieux réels et par l’apprentissage passionné auprès des maîtres de l’histoire de l’art. Laborieux, discipliné, amoureux de son métier, il maîtrise des techniques anciennes presque disparues dans une époque dominée par l’immédiateté, le court-termisme et le divertissement superficiel.

Dans le catalogue élaboré par Nelly Murdoch, plusieurs photographies en double page montrent des livres, des pinceaux, des flacons de pigments en poudre : les instruments d’un pacte vital en combustion permanente. Le volume que nous présentons ce soir inclut des images de spectateurs et de leurs ombres mouvantes face aux œuvres immobiles, évoquant non seulement l’échelle des pièces, mais aussi la fugacité inévitable de cette exposition, appelée à se loger dans la mémoire de ceux qui l’ont vécue comme un don éveillant et amplifiant des aspirations transcendantes, au-delà de la raison et des monstres annoncés par Goya.

Un long parcours a conduit Peschiera vers ses grands formats, où l’effet hypnotique de la couleur s’intensifie. Appliquée en myriades de touches — points et virgules d’un geste toujours vivant — la peinture déploie des champs chromatiques d’une subtilité extrême, obtenus par des gradations minutieuses de tons et de nuances. Ces surfaces transmettent, par les voies illusoires de la peinture, une impression de solidité comparable à celle de l’espace architectural qui les accueille.

Les formes géométriques — solides simples, universels et intemporels — émergent d’une mémoire lointaine de l’humanité. Stables, parfaites, mesurables, elles reflètent l’ordre suprême qui régit et harmonise le cosmos. Imposantes et presque fantastiques, ces constructions nous immergent dans des perspectives rigoureuses, transformant des structures apparentes en véritables partitions visuelles.

Il est possible que, dans ces architectures élevées, l’on médite et prie à l’abri des regards, gardiens imaginaires d’un temps immobile, déjà tournés vers l’éternité. Leur seule fonction semble être de rendre visibles des sentiments, des idées et des intuitions que seule la peinture peut concrétiser. Les compositions les plus complexes assemblent des blocs concaves et convexes dans un équilibre volumétrique précis. Entre eux s’ouvrent des fissures et des passages qui invitent à une exploration imaginaire.Tout tend vers l’élévation, sans ostentation. Ces œuvres réactivent des idéaux d’austérité et de dépouillement, ouvrant la voie à une élévation de l’être.

Les surfaces peintes vibrent de touches juxtaposées, évoquant les corpuscules décrits par Lucrèce dans De Rerum Natura, où la lumière est pensée comme matière en suspension.

Les œuvres de Peschiera rejoignent ce même thème — la lumière — et en proposent une interprétation étonnamment proche, à deux millénaires de distance.

Certaines surfaces possèdent la densité de la pierre, d’autres la fluidité de l’eau ou la légèreté de l’air. Des façades rouges s’impriment dans la mémoire comme des rubis ardents.

Ces intensités naissent de gestes répétés et maîtrisés, enveloppant le spectateur dans une atmosphère chaleureuse et apaisante.

Le peintre reconnaît qu’il « force un peu les choses », conscient de l’effet produit. Son objectif principal est sans doute la couleur — ou peut-être est-ce la couleur qui l’a guidé. Dans tous les cas, peintre et couleur fusionnent dans l’unité de chaque œuvre.

La couleur ne ment pas : atteindre une dimension musicale est difficile, mais une fois conquise, la victoire est indiscutable. Ayant conquis la lumière, tout devient possible. Sans le chercher, l’artiste agit comme un médiateur entre un monde menacé et la puissance du langage poétique. Sa spiritualité, libre de tout dogme, se manifeste discrètement comme un don.

Ces peintures émanent un silence primordial. Elles appartiennent à une dimension presque magique, faite de calme et de profondeur. Comme un moine du désert, l’artiste s’est retiré du bruit du monde pour entrer dans le mystère. Ses œuvres rappellent au spectateur une grandeur oubliée en lui.

Comme l’écrit Rilke dans Le Torse archaïque d’Apollon :
« Tu dois changer ta vie. »

La peinture peut, en effet, être miraculeuse, même lorsque le monde semble s’effondrer.

I have seen this exhibition several times and reread the introductory text I wrote almost a year ago, and I reaffirm each of my statements. Only silent, respectful gazes are possible before spaces that have ceased to be profane, connecting us to another dimension where silence reigns. Although adjectives, intellectual constructions, explanations, or prior narratives are unnecessary here, I will now attempt to convey my impressions.

The painter has poured his life into these works. In each of these pieces, we recognize not only the hours invested in manual labor, but also a profound commitment to the values and ideals they embody.

These paintings are not merely dazzling surfaces: they are living organisms that pulse, vibrate, and celebrate themselves as achievements of sustained control across the full extent of their rectangles. The artist has not neglected a single square centimeter, like a pianist who performs his score flawlessly, both formally and expressively, from the first to the last note. The sensation that permeates the viewer upon leaving this room can be summarized, without exaggeration, in the words of my friend Raúl Gutiérrez: “It is miraculous.”

The contrast between the chaotic, anomic reality of our global present and the works we see here could not be greater. On the side of “reality,” everything seems to collapse, to regress, to dissolve into a darkness that returns us to undifferentiation, generating ominous forebodings. Fragile as houses of cards, our social institutions crumble with no new horizon in sight, suffocated by greed and arbitrariness that have undermined our history for centuries. Leaderless, with the political sphere hijacked by corruption in all its forms, and Nature wounded to the point of dismemberment, we walk straight toward the abyss. Amid this chaos, Peschiera has gathered his paintings and constructed with them a liberated, uncontaminated zone that keeps the forces of dissolution at bay.

Painted in a dark violet hue and impeccably arranged with the works distributed along its walls, this room becomes a declared nucleus of resistance against despair. Its creator has waged a prolonged battle with the social, cultural, and artistic conventions surrounding him. Clinging to his own mast, he has deepened paths he envisioned decades ago, stripping away all symbolic objects except for the wall.

His “mantos” testify to a profound respect for the world’s many architectural settings, exalted through the memory of real places and the dedicated learning from master painters throughout art history. Laborious, disciplined, devoted to his craft, he masters ancient techniques that have nearly disappeared in this age of immediacy, short-term thinking, and trivial entertainment.

In the catalogue designed by Nelly Murdoch, several double-page photographs focus on books, brushes, and jars of powdered pigments: the tools of a vital pact in constant combustion. The volume we present tonight includes images of viewers and their moving shadows before the static works, not only conveying scale, but also alluding to the inevitable transience of this exhibition, which will reside in the memory of those who experienced it as a gift that awakens, expands, and reinforces transcendent aspirations, beyond reason and beyond the monsters foretold by Goya.

A long journey has led Peschiera to his large formats, where the hypnotic effect of color intensifies. Applied in countless brushstrokes—points and commas that repeat a gesture always alive and splendidly varied—the large scale allows the full display of his chromatic fields. These are achieved through extremely subtle tonal gradations, calibrated with such precision that they convey—through the illusory means of painting—a sense of solidity comparable to the architectural space that contains them.

Geometric forms—solids, the most simple, universal, timeless shapes—emerge from a remote memory of the species. As enclosed regions of space, they are stable, perfect, regular, measurable. Immune to change, they reflect the supreme order that governs and harmonizes the cosmos. Imposing and fantastical, drawn with extraordinary control, Peschiera’s structures gently immerse us in the rigorous perspectives of their courses, transforming what might be accumulations of bricks into visual scores.

It is possible that within these tall structures, meditation and prayer take place at an unseen dawn, hidden from this side, where the blind wall conceals their occupants—imaginary guardians of a static time, isolated from the transient world, already inhabiting eternity behind them. Their architect has assigned them no other function than to make visible feelings, ideas, and intuitions that can only be realized through painting.

The most complex compositions assemble concave and convex blocks in precisely balanced volumetric relationships. Between them appear fissures and discreet passages that invite the viewer to imagine entering beyond. Everything points upward, without spectacle or ostentation. These monuments reactivate marginal, postponed ideals of austerity and restraint—vehicles for an ascent toward a higher plane of existence, both intelligent and sensitive.

The painted surfaces, smooth and uniform, vibrate with juxtaposed colors, agitated like traces of brushstrokes—points and commas, corpuscles, atoms suspended—echoing lines from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, where light is described as particles floating in space. Peschiera’s brushstrokes immerse us in the same theme—light—arriving at remarkably similar conclusions across two millennia. Some surfaces possess the weight and consistency of stone or fired earth; others the fluidity of water, the lightness of air, or the force of fire. A pair of red facades resonates behind the eyes, fixing themselves in memory like rubies. These intensities are achieved through controlled, repeated gestures, enveloping the viewer in a warm, calming, and fascinating atmosphere.

Layer by layer, pigments mature across each canvas. Their subtle variations reformulate timeless, universal questions in painterly terms. The painter admits that he “pushes things a bit,” aware of the complex effect his work generates. His primary aim is undoubtedly color. Peschiera has taken color to a remarkable level of development—or perhaps color has led him along its royal path. In any case, painter and color merge into the unity of each piece. Color does not lie: achieving a musical level is arduous, but once attained, the victory is undeniable. Having conquered light, everything becomes possible.

His achievement is not sudden or Promethean, but the result of patient dedication, discipline, and lifelong dialogue with art. Without intending to, the artist acts as a connector between a world threatened by its own irrationality and the visible magic of poetic language and human aspiration. Free from doctrinal implications, his spirituality shines quietly, like a gift from one spirit to another. These paintings emanate a primordial silence. They belong to the realm of the magical—receptacles of stillness and peace, glimpses of a hidden reality awaiting us beyond time and space.

Like a desert monk, the artist withdraws from noise to enter the mystery of the soul. His paintings remind us of a forgotten greatness within us. Painting, like all true art, can provoke revelation—as Rilke writes in Archaic Torso of Apollo:
“You must change your life.”

Painting indeed can be miraculous, even as the world falls apart.

Pedro Peschiera’s trajectory of life constitutes, vitally and artistically, a peculiar case among Peruvian painters of his generation: born and trained in Lima, he emigrated to Switzerland more than four decades ago. Established in Geneva, he develops on the shores of its large lake a complex, enigmatic work, crafted in absolutely personal terms. Despite the distance that completely sets them apart from the current trends and common places of these times, the formal and conceptual riches displayed in his canvases are established and rooted in their own right in the turbulent areas of our contemporaneity.

A passionate student of the cultural traditions of the so-called Old World by the Christian conquerors of America, Peschiera became familiar with the symbolic universe of medieval architecture, with the master painters of the first Renaissance, with the mannerists and with the moderns, all assimilated by his critical and markedly selective spirit. In his works the chromatic keys of the desert coast of his homeland also persist, although veiled, evocations of a nostalgic bond that he is not willing to lose. “Being Peruvian,” he declared, “and deeply loving European art and culture, being immersed, but always knowing that I am not European and that I will never be able to be one, that I will always be far away, constitutes a large part of my Peruvianness.” Full stop. Going deeper into this question is irrelevant: his visual achievements distinguish him as an independent and reflective cosmopolitan creator, embarked on a search for a transcendent content, and not at all concessive with the changeable compulsions of current tastes and the market.

In a sense opposed to that of the artistic avant-garde that more than a century ago renounced its own civilizational foundations and resorted to the exoticism of the “primitive” peripheries in search of uncontaminated air, Peschiera delves fundamentally into classical Greco-Latin antiquity and its ancient legacy. Solitary – although not isolated – his vision and practice challenge the impositions of dominant, authoritarian, discriminatory thought, typical of our thanatized present, subjected by fanaticism and irreducible fears. How does a temperament like his respond to the sliding collective march towards self-destruction, despite the scientific and technological advances that amaze us every day?

Peschiera’s paintings are part of a counter-current plea —although marginal, barely visible, silenced under the prevailing dissonances— to preserve values in every area and order of things. Dedicated to the cultivation of inalienable ideals, he faces the persistent challenge of collective death with the available weapons of his mental and manual creativity. His is a tenacious, quiet, lucid fight against escape exits and the fallacies of immediacy spread over the face of the earth. Stubbornly, the artist imagines and conquers spaces freed from the surrounding nightmare. In his work, COLOR, the main protagonist of the art of painting dominates, sovereign, self-sufficient and imperturbable. His immobile, serene compositions, filled with contemplative qualities, are empty settings, radically devoid of all agitation and animated presences. There the viewer is immersed, bathed in chromatic transparencies like those of medieval stained glass. Delicate to the highest degree, these tonal gradations seem to come from an alternative universe, contrasted in their harmonious perfection with the somber violence of the world that is imploding before our stupefied gaze. Discreetly, the painter—despite or thanks to his declared agnosticism—perseveres and excavates tirelessly, confident in the superior capacities that he recognizes in himself and, by extension, in all of humanity. In an inconspicuous manner, his practice emulates his ancestors in the Roman catacombs, who left behind their salvific emblems before being devoured by wild beasts driven mad by hunger. One of his statements is particularly illustrative: “The religious link may no longer be there, but the trace still remains.”

“My painting could not have existed in another time,” he clarifies. The foundation stone of his trade, his technical knowledge—atypical in these times—comes from suppliers as prolific and affordable as never before in history, which he defines as “the enormous inventory inherited through the ages.” His cult for manual work has led him to study, among countless treatises, the 189 chapters of The Book of Art by Cennino Cennini – a student of Agnolo Gaddi, initiated in turn by his father, Taddeo, godson and disciple for 24 years of the great Giotto—and to personally contact artists such as Tilsa Tsuchiya, who instilled in him her love for the quality of the pictorial surface, as well as her discovery of glazing. Another great Peruvian painter, Julia Navarrete, exerted on him her teaching uninterruptedly since her distant days at the then School of Plastic Arts of the Catholic University of Peru, where its director Adolfo Winternitz repeated like a mantra that the artist’s work consisted of “10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.” His intellectual concerns took him for several semesters into the classrooms of such distinguished teachers as the humanist George Steiner, he became familiar with modern literature as well as with the texts of the First Fathers of the Church – Origen, John Damascene, Augustine of Hippo – and to venture temporarily into Cistercian monasteries to experience firsthand the daily austerity of their occupants. His pictorial themes faithfully testify to the same radical renunciation and respectful approach to the strict rule of these renunciates, at the antipodes of the headless hedonism that distracts and subjugates the common layman.

Peschiera describes himself as “someone who loves painting” and acknowledges: “My painting and its space and even its color has something intrinsically Italian.” With this, he genetically claims a sensitivity nourished by his exhaustive artistic visits to the land of his elders. Free of pretense, he always tours museums and monuments in admiration, and unintentionally continues the path of the cave magician, the desert hermit, the Romanesque architect, the Gothic stonemason and the solitary avant-gardist, turned into a medium who links the high and the low. Transmitter of avid and laboriously assembled beauties, he lives to paint, convinced that his routine in front of the easel is transmuted into personal fulfillment. Only then does he become the first spectator of astonishing births, a generator of meaning and incomparable surprises. Fascinated with the emotional and sensual power of color, he checks how much each strip of the rainbow influences the content of a painting: “It is as if the paintings manifested their need to be, their urgency to exist.”

The infinite possibilities of superimposition, the juxtaposition or the vicinity of color fields – as demonstrated by the works of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers, the first «atmospheric» and the others «hard-edged» – as well as their approaches and variations, function as “guarantors of the non-exhaustion of forms.” If at the beginning Peschiera kept his distance from the best painting of the last century (“the avant-garde,” he maintained, “had little or nothing to do with my relationship with life or the world”), his appreciation changed in the face of Kazimir Malevitch’s paradigmatic work. Malevich and his followers, especially the American minimalists. Inspired by the statement “less is more”, coined by the architect Mies Van der Rohe, the (almost) monochrome squares of Ad Reinhardt, the reticular plots of Agnes Martin, the “religiosity without images” of Brice Marden and a long list of artists, influenced decisively in the remarkable turnaround of his painting in recent decades, when he brightened-up his palette and reemphasized the plane as a receptacle of reverberant interactions, of joyful vibrations. This crossroads led the painter to clarify his desire to “force things a little” and “transfigure” them.

Far from mimetic desires, Peschiera erects fantastic walls, smoothes-out facades embedded with topazes, sapphires, emeralds, amethysts and countless jeweled particles, solidly cemented by geometry. These architectural elevations—we speculate—would have delighted Georges Seurat as a reflection of his most audacious dreams and intuitions. His technique perceptively dismantles the common visible continuity into tiny units, fused by the science of color: the feast for the eye contained in the prematurely truncated approaches of the French pointillist master. The hand and sensitive understanding are the pulse of these splendid planes, they qualitatively surpass the routinely observable reality and reach auratic dimensions as familiar to the ancients as they are strange to current views, satisfied and atrophied by their devices and pixels.

An arc of sixty millennia rises between the aboriginal art of Australia – the oldest living culture on the planet, where the “dot” is still used in Dream Time recreations to this day – the late works of Vermeer, “chromoluminarism” – or “divisionism”—post-impressionism of Seurat and Signac, the dotted surfaces of Parisian synthetic cubism known as “confetti” and the “benday” dots of Roy Lichtenstein. In his theoretical texts, Vasili Kandinsky defined the dot as “the simplest unit of the image”, whose repetition enables “different visual sonorities” to be achieved. This succinct account does not intend to exhaust the precedents of the works discussed here, only to give an idea of the omnipresence of this primary element of painting, “origin,” in Kandinsky’s words, “of the rest of natural forms.”

Solid, massive like the basic geometric figures, the parallelepipeds built by Peschiera stand with their feet firmly planted on the ground. Their elemental forms rest on the rigorous, patiently calibrated measurement of the linear structures projected as safe receptacles for subsequent chromatic displays, planes differentiated by the tones of their slightly contrasting orientations, without any allusion to the hours or the passage of time, as to the shadows cast by the Sun as a source of light. Fitted to the quadrangular perimeter laid with the precision of the great perspectivists (Alberti, Uccello, Da Vinci), in these polychrome screens the conventional dichotomies of figuration/abstraction, past/present are dissolved, and the gravitating opposition between retinal painting and conceptual art, is as captivating as the insolent, playful and subversive personality of its author, Marcel Duchamp. Peschiera’s inventions cannot be assigned to any previous style, apart from their vague, distant Romanesque air. If we dispense with the allusions to the physical world—the static floors and skies that frame them— only progressive horizontal parallels, symmetrically arched, schemes barely differentiated from each other will remain. They are abstract constructions, concretions of objects lodged in the mind, which he draws, turns, and scrutinizes at will, he navigates intellectual labyrinths and transforms them into dreamlike captures. They imitate nothing. They open as autonomous bodies and scores where visual harmonies resonate, configured by themselves as unclassifiable expressions of a slow and secure gestation, assignable—given that pictorial art lacks a specific muse in the Greek pantheon—to Terpsichore, “she who delights in the dance».

It is amusing to imagine what Marcel Duchamp would have thought of Peschiera’s emulsified tempera paintings, so seductive to the retinal lenses and simultaneously carriers of ideas elaborated by an expressive need. These considerations lead us to repeat a truism: there is no art without concepts. Perhaps the author of the Ready-mades would have distanced himself from his ingenious and revealing linguistic games and openly reconciled himself with the mysteries of pictorial art and its consubstantial silence. (It is no secret to anyone that, despite his inflammatory statements, the great Marcel never stopped painting). Perhaps, in the face of these meticulously thought out and manufactured displays—intricately sensitive and intellectual—he would have advocated for a more than pertinent and necessary re-materialization of art.

What do we find behind the Mantos and the dazzling facades, but a landscape populated with previous symbols, that is: boats, shells, tables, wells, bowls, bells and other containers of the void? A long, winding path has led the painter to conceive and develop these planes stratified by precise lines, these bare lines, progressively arched like open books that embrace us between subtle modulations. A lyrical, quiet, imposing breath, at the same time solemn and light, shines in these wefts of stone or brick. Identifying the material is unimportant: it is just paint, just touches of egg tempera, a recipe inherited from Byzantium, from the miniaturized manuscripts, from the hermit monks who fly invisible over these surfaces. Carved with superlative diligence, these walls condense a unique meaning, unusual in these orphaned times, devoid of higher aspirations, dominated by the desire for speed and productive efficiency, premeditated and inevitably disposable.

Let’s pause briefly on the title that groups the architectures: “Arks/Karakoram-Landscape». The triad provokes an incantatory, enchanting, euphonious effect, simultaneously referring to a geological fact (the mountain range called Karakorum in Turkish, which means ‘black rock’, equivalent to the term Krishnagin, ‘black mountains’, in Sanskrit), to Bible history (the Ark of the Flood or that of the Covenant of the Hebrew people with Yahweh) and a fantastic conception of the landscape seen as the sum and receptacle of architectural peaks. The associated names contain their own logic. They enunciate in Peschiera’s personal key the complexity contained in his apparently simple constructions. Nothing gratuitous, verbal riddles add layers of meaning to the countless overlapping chromatic touches.

Painting is the outer, visible layer of the concerns that bubble within the artist. His march inward accumulates events, revelations, discoveries, assimilations and significant sediments. Intense and passionate, his reflective vein has been permanently marked by questions that do not wait for an answer: they only seek to be formulated clearly, and to open the cracks of an enduringly rooted mysticism. The traveler persists in his elucidation efforts, familiar with the spiritual achievements of all times and origins. His path advances in the company of writers as diverse as his admired Herman Melville and the metaphysical symbolist René Guénon, to authors barely known to the general public. One of the latter, Roger Munier—French disseminator of Heidegger, commentator of the quietist mystic Angelus Silesius, translator of haikus, whom he “would have liked to meet”—has written enigmatic aphorisms, like the quote that heads these paragraphs. These examples help to illustrate the painter’s prolific readings, his vocation for probing the depths, venturing into the territory of the secret, the miracle of consciousness and the wonder of living, and for inhabiting the most hidden and poetic spaces of thought.

“There is something in what I see that I do not see. That makes the magic of what I see.” That “something” is a gray, indeterminate area, oscillating between the gaze that penetrates and the mind that wonders. Simultaneously, paradoxically, it reveals and hides the insufficiencies of reason to address the mystery of being here, in this inexhaustibly interpretable phenomenal world, resistant to tautologies as well-known and popular as Frank Stella’s statement: “What you see is what you see.” Among many others, the great American painter Philip Guston agrees almost literally with Munier: “Painting is not on a surface but on an imagined plane. It moves in the mind. It’s not there physically, at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic. Therefore, what you see is not what you see.” Both statements take us back to the famous saying of Leonardo da Vinci, for whom painting “è cosa mentale.”

The common use of our sense of sight undergoes particularly complex challenges when faced with pictorial works such as those of Peschiera, they are reluctant to be defined by reason. By broadening the conventional way—the automatic mode adopted by the eye to recognize objects—these works persuasively lead the viewer within the painted plane. The painted spaces remain invariably two-dimensional, measurable, tangible, but they give off indefinable, unusual qualities, unapproachable by words. In front of these qualities, we can only look and remain silent. The visual arts in general, and painting in particular, open access to little-explained (but no less real) domains of sensibility. They expand known frontiers, expose verbal insufficiencies, recreate preconscious dazzlement traceable to Paleolithic ritual, to the forgotten origin; buried by one of the covert adversaries of our artistic horizon: the explanatory and supposedly deciphering mania, which only spoils the silent game between stimuli and responses. We live saturated with images, concepts predigested by specialists, full of false prophets who from time to time decree the death of painting, of the easel, for whom oil paints and their solvents are synonymous with a past without a future. In truth, technological advances have demonstrated little more than naiveté: random 3D parodies, hypnotic substitutes for an increasingly infantilized mass public, ignorant along the entire line of “unplugged” values.

Pedro Peschiera’s art has reached an unquestionable level of quality. Its excellence will maintain a permanent relevance, immune to change and passing fashions. It is to be hoped that these paintings will one day be incorporated into public collections, hopefully not too far away, and their achievements will be disseminated as healing music, relief, and as an antidote to general discouragement. His paintings counteract the existential superficiality that ravages all social levels. They dignify life, exalting it. They reinforce individual defenses in these opaque times, so prone to precipitating indifference and giving up options such as refuge in the so-called “comfort zones.” Nothing falls from the sky; they seem to tell us. Like the generations that built the cathedrals defying the law of gravity, the oppressions, and the lurking dangers, they proclaim that the human soul is capable of undertaking and performing seemingly unattainable feats. These luminous works continue the instructive dictates of uninterrupted cultural transmissions, determined to vivify the remote dreams of the species, to not die. The vital will counteracts meaninglessness. It can fill it with aesthetic and moral values, confront the terrors and uncertainties inherent to our condition. A sleepless, constant, responsible task, always within reach of our hands.

Ricardo Wiesse R.

Philippe Cuenat: Some of your subject matter has remained almost constant for the last thirty years or so. Would you say your aesthetic, moral, political, and spiritual references are still the same?

Pedro Peschiera: That’s right, some of my subject matter hasn’t changed much. From the start, when I began developing an iconography I realized that there were some themes that were particularly broad, persisting, and useful for what I wanted to say, and that they would endure for a long time. The content of my work has not changed much either, since it offers depth and takes many forms – however, the range of motifs has widened and will continue to do so. Basically, I have sought to plough a broad and deep furrow, developing the concept of a family of paintings. At any event, until I feel that I have exhausted a particular form or feel the need, the compulsion and, in particular, the desire to use a specific theme, I will carry on doing so.

My aesthetic references have evolved. The influences of Romanesque architecture, early Renaissance painting and architectural geometrics have persisted as a basic structure, like a foundation.

Later I became passionate about 16th-century Venetian painting, the French and Italian landscape artists of the 17th century, and certain contemporary artists. Perhaps this does not yet come through clearly in my painting, but I think it is becoming visible in my treatment of colour. I think that for anyone who loves painting, the old Venetians will always hold currency. I look at them often, I find it essential for me to drink from the sources; in my case, things evolve slowly and almost always continuously and seamlessly.

At the beginning of the 1980s I gradually became agnostic. This was a very difficult but pivotal period for me. Naturally, my moral and political views shifted as a result. Actually, the Christian tradition left an indelible mark morally speaking but there was no longer that somewhat ascetic aspect of renouncement that had so attracted me previously. Politically, I have no fixed position. On some matters I can be conservative, on others, libertarian. I don’t like political correctness; I don’t like prevailing currents of thought in general.

Ph. C.: Your painting takes place within a mimetic space and yet that space does not really have anything to do with an effort to be naturalistic or realistic. Should we deduce that there is a fundamentally anti-naturalist stance within you? Does this perhaps originate from the fact that your work is constructed more than anything else on imitatio, as regards the old masters?

P.P.: During my childhood and adolescence in Lima my mother had a number of books on art at home. I was captivated by the reproductions of the paintings from the Renaissance to the 20th century. There were no museums housing any works by the great masters of Western painting. My first introduction to art was through reproductions of figurative works where mimesis and illusionistic space dominated.

Only a short time later I discovered Cubist painting, abstract art, medieval art, the Italian primitives—always in books, of course. My situation was much the same as most people in Lima. When I decided to become a painter, I had a vague idea of abstract painting but opted for a figuration that was more or less illusionistic. I say more or less because I loved Gauguin, Redon, Munch, Monet’s last period…

I always knew that I needed a subject matter or, at the least, a theme. The question of “pure” painting held no interest for me and I had absolutely no desire to pursue it. What attracted me, and still attracts me, is the theme in painting—not exclusively so when it comes to appreciating other people’s art, of course—, but as far as I am concerned, absolutely. For me, everything hinges on the art of ensuring that subject matter does not destroy the painting, that even though the subject is powerful, the painting must be even more so. This is a rich dialectic.

In spite of my interest in non-figurative and abstract art, it seemed to me—and still does—that figurative painting lends itself more to playing with the viewer’s perception and by manipulating how you represent things, you can lead them to a particular place, toward a particular poetic realm. It seems to me that there are infinite ways of modifying, of modulating, of heightening or diminishing the effects of illusionistic space, with the advantage that that space is set in a kind of terrain that is common to all; namely, that of mimesis or representation of appearances of the world around us.

It is fundamental to me that a painting has a general direction, however imprecise, before I start work on it – even though that direction may shift as I proceed. Of course, in my case, the direction is far from exclusively pictorial.

It might seem strange, but my interest in art or painting does not come directly from my life, from my experience of the world, or my observation of reality. More than anything, it is born from my passion for paintings themselves, be they very old, old, less old, or modern; a passion for that vast treasure handed down over the ages. Often, though, when I look at and admire them, I forget about their history, since to me that is not what matters most. Paintings I admire, whatever period they are from, are ones that genuinely stimulate me, both mentally and on a sensory level. At first, I find them terribly intimidating, but at the same time, above all, they give me an enormous urge to paint. I often think that I would have loved to have painted them… In my imagination I try to incorporate in my work the paintings that appeal to me, to make them mine; I’ve been doing that for a long time now and I still do it, even today.

Naturalism, realism, are not the right path for me: I am not drawn to rigorous observation, description, imitation of the world, or to the use of photography in the pictorial process. I always thought I was too subjective to be a realist. It is not a question of taste because I like realistic painting; it’s just that it’s not a path I want to go down. I have always needed to keep a kind of distance from reality. For example, the conception of space in the predellas of the Italian primitives, the early Renaissance painters, even that of the Mannerists, has had a profound impact on me.

The plausible but perfectly artificial and geometric space of Piero della Francesca has been fundamental for me, as have the distortions and false perspectives of the primitives, the tightly confined, flat, crowded spaces in some of Pontormo’s or Rosso Fiorentino’s paintings. I really appreciate reliefs where the contrast of the convex and the concave offset each other, all compressed together tightly in a narrowly constrained space.

There is, of course, an imaginary, subjective way of constructing illusory space. Using a closed space such as I use, with massive prominent volumes, heightened or foreshortened perspectives, arbitrary lighting, playing with scale, flat finishes or atmospheric degradés, and God knows what else… and all that without even counting colour… All these ways, all these possibilities for treating, manipulating illusory space prevent me from finding a fit with realism, even if I wanted to, since I find the urge to push things a little, to transfigure them, irresistible. It is part of a sense of freedom, of the possibilities I feel when I paint. It is as if I find my own elements there, a language to construct a world, a vision. I don’t think I’m an antirealist or an anti-naturalist. If the current prevailing trend were realism or naturalism, then things could be seen that way, to be sure, but I simply believe that it is impossible for me to be one or the other, sadly perhaps, since I love the landscapes of Courbet, of Corot, as well as Lucien Freud and the woodcuts of Franz Gertsch…

As regards the old masters, I like to see myself in a kind of time continuum. Why deprive oneself? Why exclude anything? I have always found the old and the not-so-old masters essential.

Ph. C.: Let me just stay with this point a little because I think it’s key to your relationship with painting and the issue of representation. You say that you haven’t been tempted by photographic reproduction, and yet it was through that medium that the issue of representation made a comeback, and with it, painting, after the formalist art of 1969-70. The other core thrust of the return to painting at that time took the form of primitivism, gesture, immediacy, the instinctive, but also of dreams of a violent and spectacular oneiric quality. This aspect of the return to painting belongs, like its more “conceptual” counterpart, to the context in which you were trained. Is the work of Cucchi, for example, or other artists of the Transavanguardia, with their schematization of space, their anti-naturalist references—particularly in their choice of colour, which appears to me to be a major characteristic of your work at the moment—resonate with you?

P.P.: Throughout almost my entire training in Lima, and later in Geneva, I only had a rough knowledge of what was going on in contemporary art at the time. As I came from far away, I observed all that with a certain distance and felt that it had little or nothing to do with me. In my case, my decision to paint was based on a rather approximate and general knowledge of art history that began with the Renaissance and ended at the end of the 19th century. I knew a little about the early avant-garde movements of the 20th century, but I was under the impression that they had been started by painters with a solid grounding and knowledge of painting and its history, and that they were reacting by making a break with tradition. That was not my reality at all.

I was interested in finding my way in a broader and, above all, richer history than one concerned exclusively with the avant-garde periods. It also seemed to me that the avant-garde movements were a particular branch of artistic creation that neither truly represented it as a whole, nor constituted its only relevant aspects. I knew a little about pop art but almost nothing about conceptual art, minimalism or other trends of the time. It was toward the end of my studies at art school and during my time at university that I learned a lot more about the importance of the contemporary avant-garde movements and about the limitations that they held, their norms and dogma; but by then my direction was set.

The issues of the avant-gardes did not inspire me as something to follow or as something which I needed to adopt a position on or explicitly represent in my work. The choices, processes and issues of the avant-gardes had little or no bearing on how I related to life and the world. As a result, my decision to paint, particularly figurative painting, had almost nothing to do with a reaction against the extreme formalism of preceding trends or with a reflection on the return to painting and representation brought about by photography, primitivism, neo-expressionism or the Italian Transavanguardia. For me it was never about placing spontaneous subjectivity in the foreground, whether by means of brushwork, fiery treatment of the pictorial subject, or a kind of personal mythology that would only tell my own story.

I think the clearest influences in my work are the “pittura metafisica” of Giorgio de Chirico, Romanesque architecture and also much of the Italian primitives and their space, which, precisely because of their ingenuity and freedom in terms of perspective, appeared “modern” in a plastic sense. I would also like to mention a Peruvian artist of Japanese descent, Tilsa Tsuchiya. She had a major influence on my painting. My interest in the quality of pictorial surfaces and my discovery of glazing came from meeting her and my admiration for her art. Then came Piero, Rothko and his somewhat atmospheric fields of colour.

Kiefer’s landscapes or the work Anish Kapoor touch me more than Enzo Cucchi (of whose work I have seen little) and others… I have also examined the fields of colour painted by Matisse and Brice Marden, the vibrant colour surfaces of Bonnard long before those of Cucchi. However, I have to admit that my painting and its space—even its colour—have something intrinsically Italian about them. It’s true that having brought my façades into the extreme foreground until they occupy almost the entire surface of the painting is a radical act—hyperbole of subject matter, an oversized object, which becomes a field of colour, the surface on which to be able to experiment with colour with ever greater intensity—, an act that could “look” very 20th century. In short, my work owes little to the art of the last fifty years. My aesthetic identity, my sensibilities, my personal affinities have prevailed over a more committed and more positive stance in terms of producing sheer novelty.

Ph. C.: Let’s briefly return to the question of colour. How do you see its role in your work? Could it not be said – somewhat provocatively – that it allows you to infinitely vary the appearance of a work that is constantly repeated?

P.P.: Once I had brought the façades and other motifs considerably closer to the foreground, I realized that would allow me to use large surfaces where colour could be applied in a more or less fragmented way to enhance its vibrancy. First I used very dark tones, seeking to distance myself, rather, from the lighter paintings that I had made previously in my formative period, which represented desert landscapes with architectures.

With time I grew in confidence, the tones gradually lightened and the colours intensified. Little by little, colour acquired great importance, although I did not use it in a pure or crude way. The colour is usually modulated by a large amount of glazing. The use of glazing on large surfaces gave me a glimpse of the enormous wealth of possibilities of colour. This slow and gradual treatment of colour now holds a kind of fascination for me and has become a land to be explored. The effects of depth, luminosity, intensity, and atmosphere that I can obtain interest me greatly. One can see the colour appear, ripen, and blossom. I also like “thinking up” colours before applying them to the canvas; I like to speculate about them and their interactions in my mind’s eye.

Another of colour’s attributes that is very important for me is its ever so profoundly sensory and emotive aspect. This isn’t the time to go on at length about the endless list of investigations, thoughts, or teachings on colour through the ages; its symbolism, and its psychological effects, etc. I am familiar with some of the founding texts, but it is enough for me to be aware of the extent to which colours have significant impacts that resonate within me: emotive, affective phenomena that lead to a kind of empiricism of enjoyment of colour. The pleasure, the enjoyment of painting were always an integral part of my work. At the same time, my painting is clearly not hedonistic and the concerns and direction of my work transcend mere pleasure. That is why I can afford to accentuate the sensorial aspect.

The colour in my painting has to do with seduction, with the desire to lead the viewer. Colour fills the iconic-conceptual structure—the motifs, subject matter, surfaces—with an intensity that transfigures it, precisely because it is not entirely realistic colour. This produces a sense of presence which has to do with how the colour has been applied; its fragmentation in an accumulation of small dabs produces density. That feeling of density also has to do with the perception of time, with its concentration in the plethora of superimposed layers, dabs and glazes that form the surface of my paintings.

The idea that my work repeats itself while always changing in appearance is an interpretation that I consider valid. It is a perfectly justifiable if impoverishing view. To reduce the work to that repetition would be a little sad. I have another outlook on things. From the outset, when I instituted the notion of a family of paintings, I had already taken the repetition aspect into account because I knew that some motifs would recur more or less continually over an undetermined period of time. As I said earlier, I originally conceived my work on the basis of families or groups of paintings interconnected by analogies of form or sibling concepts, with the result that several motifs might be revisited indefinitely.

I believe that colour has a fundamental influence on moods or states of mind. One of my Mantos in lemon yellow has little to do with another in golden yellow, for example. They are two separate sensory and affective realities. This variation, which might be anodyne to some, is for me intriguing, indispensable. Both realities ask, demand to exist! Each deserves to be its own complete reality, a painting in itself. Let us imagine, then, the effects of a blood-red Manto and compare it with the lemon yellow one. There we really are faced with two realities, two profoundly different experiences. The motif might be very similar or even the same, but how can we ignore it. Does the fact that the motif returns transformed in another sensory and emotional reality automatically mean that it is a repetition? Is it that simple? On the other hand, is a shift or variation in the subject matter, motif, or even theme, sufficient to speak of change?

In my opinion, colour has the power to influence the content of a painting. To some extent it can modify it, contradict or magnify it, for example (but, beyond words, of course), enrich it in some form or another. It is not there to act simply as “filling.” I maintain what I said at the beginning that until I find that a form has been exhausted and feel the need, urgency and, above all, the desire to use a particular motif or theme, I will continue to do so. In my case it is often as if the paintings were showing their need to be, their urgent desire to exist. The painting imposes itself on me, which plays in very well with my own urgency and desire. For me, it is as if this urgency and desire ensure that forms are not yet exhausted. It looks as if my work will always be the same, but one needs to realize that in painting appearance is all. If the appearance of the painting changes, then the painting changes with it.

Ph. C.: The colour and its decorative magnificence, its sensuality, aren’t they perhaps the first signs of a denial of history, of variation, of change? What would you say to those who claim that your work embodies the image of an ideal world without any reference to the “secular,” which would make it more like a utopian, anachronistic space whose main reference is religious?

P.P.: I don’t think that either the magnificence or the sensuality of colour are necessarily solely decorative. The colour isn’t there just to give pleasure. There is nothing to stop colour having a more complex and deeper dimension than simply superficial pleasure. Perhaps it all depends on the intentions that motivate it and what the painter does with it.

However, to return to your question, while it may be true that my work makes no direct or explicit reference to our timeframe, that does not mean that it is devoid of any trace of our times.

My paintings could not have existed in another period. They suggest an implicit human presence since almost all the images/motifs depicted are man-made objects (façades, bowls, boats, etc.) and their representation—perhaps because of the lack of mediation—play a dramatic or theatrical role where the viewer is concerned. These motifs draw the viewer into the painting, they seek him, question him; it is up to him to form an idea of their nature, of their possible meanings.

Although the constructions are reminiscent of Romanesque religious architecture, they suggest neither the function nor the nature of the buildings or façades. The architectures have become minimal. By assimilating certain contemporary trends, they have been secularized, purged, “modernized.” The reductionism and enlargement of the motifs that appeared in my work toward the end of the 1980s and aimed at achieving a more resounding impact on the viewer, coincided with my late discovery of the minimalist art of the 1970s. While not an influence per se, one might say that a certain formalism that was in vogue may have had a reassuring effect.

While it does not overtly bear witness to the era or the history of art of the last seventy years, my painting is a part of history and of its time. It is not utopian since it never sets itself up as an example or a model. If anything, rather, it is “atopian.” If my paintings were reality, strictly speaking they would be unbearable, unsuited for existence. They represent an ideal world in the sense that any structured scene or landscape in painting does, as does any abstraction or stylization of formal order. Piero is as ideal as Poussin or Mondrian, and Morandi, as ideal as Rothko.

My work in painting is a contemplative undertaking. It uses references that allude to the ancient and the sacred; it uses a slow and elaborate technique which presupposes a desire to live our time more slowly. It does not surprise me that some perceive it as anachronistic. As modern or postmodern Western individuals we have access to a truly vast store of artistic practices. Why not reactivate them? Why not harness them? The possibility of taking them and using certain fragments of that heritage that are still intelligible to us in order to talk about ourselves in this our time, could prove relevant and seems an entirely legitimate endeavour.

As for the religious issue, it is a bit of a cliché, but it touches on various aspects of our existence, and not just the fact of adhering closely or loosely to a particular doctrine or belief. Fundamentally, the problem is one of meaning, and any idea that implies the notion of quality or of ethics is to some degree an offshoot of that problem. I do not think that my painting makes references to religion in any strict sense. On a broad level—and leaving aside my agnosticism—one might say that there is a metaphysical or spiritual aspect to my work, even if only to the extent of its emptiness. To put it in a nutshell, perhaps the nexus is no more, but the trace lingers on.

Because of its connoting imagery, pictorial technique, and the amount of time and work that goes into each painting, my work alludes to the question of meaning, to the fact that meaning can seem inaccessible; it is underpinned by the notion of emptiness, of things waiting to be filled, by the absence of ultimate meaning, even by the absence of any meaning at all, full stop. In its own way, my painting stands as one of innumerable possibilities of living and making art in this century; however, it refuses to be a record of our times in a journalistic or sociological sense. It is, therefore, a really rather atypical case in our contemporaneity. I hope that there is still a place for it.

Ph. C.: Could that place be defined by your relationship to your “Peruvianness”? To put it another way, if you think the question pertinent, how would you define your position with respect to the art and history of your country of origin?

P.P.: It is certainly plausible, but the “place” I was thinking of, if you’ll forgive the presumption, would be in the context of art in general. The fact that I am Peruvian is always there; it is my foundation, it is part of what makes me who I am, but in an implicit, not explicit, way. I am aware of it, but really I hardly ever think about it.

It would be mainly in relation to the geographic location or the cultural history of my country that I could situate that “Peruvian-ness,” my “Peruvian-ness.” The fact that I was born into a family completely Western in its culture and customs, in a country far from the great cultural metropolises, and which to some extent was—and still is—culturally dependent on them, illuminates an important aspect of my cultural identity.

In my childhood I had little exposure to Peru’s pre-Columbian or colonial art. At school we learned about the history of the pre-Inca and Inca cultures, as well as about the colonial era, but the emphasis was not so much on art. We were taught things from a slightly 19th-century Western viewpoint and pre-Columbian art was studied as something that was extinct, in the same way as Aztec or Egyptian art—an art and an aesthetic that had existed, whose cycle had run its course and whose time was up. That art was a relic of the past, of a non-Western culture that was no longer fully alive as it had been before the conquest.

Moreover, as we had almost no contact with modern art at school, we had no modern references such as Paul Klee, Albers or others who might have made us aware of the art of ancient Peru and shown us what there was to admire in it and recover from it. I realize that other artists’ experiences were very different to mine. I know people who had a very important, not to say essential, aesthetic contact early in their lives with either the pre-Columbian or the colonial art of Peru. Pre-Columbian art has left a profound mark on many important Peruvian artists.

In my case, the predominant model was the Western European or North American one, from where almost all of our culture came. I could say that my culture and my relationship to art was built with my eyes fixed on the Western metropolises, with Peruvian specificities left on the periphery. We shouldn’t forget that until the 1970s—I left Peru in 1975—the main artistic centres of the world were Europe and the United States and also that the debate about the colonialist or post-colonialist significance of this situation was at the time still determined in great part by the Western Marxist intelligentsia. The intellectual agenda, at least where art was concerned, had not yet shifted to postmodernism nor had narratives become plural.

It was, then, more than anything, an anxious and naïve view from afar of the Western cultural poles that shaped and inspired me, and which, despite having lived for so long in Europe, shape me still. Being Peruvian and profoundly loving European art and culture, being embedded but always knowing that I am not European and never can be, that I’ll always be far away, constitutes a great part of my Peruvian-ness.

Ph. C.: Where does your side work stand? I ask bearing in mind that these works that appeared later in your career have introduced a new sphere of representation and seem closer to contemporary quests, particularly the use of quotations and the role of the word with regard to the image.

P.P.: I conceived my photo engravings, silkscreen prints and, more recently, digigraphies as a complement to my painting, a way of bringing fourth questions that are a part of me, of making a statement or of presenting certain aspects of my pictorial quest. Generally speaking these works are a reflection in which the image and the word merge in a conceptual synthesis that specifically addresses my pictorial activity. At other times their relationship with painting is less direct and they have to do with my philosophical interests or aesthetic positions. But those works are always linked, whether loosely or closely, to my work in painting, where their raison d’être originates. It is true that those works did not come into being at the same time as my painting, but later, and they stem from the context in which I found myself at the time. For me they were a way of “opening a door” on the characteristics peculiar to my painting, a way of making it more accessible to a public, a critical community that I perceived to be less interested in painting—especially in a kind of painting that, without using photography, relied on perspective and was of a sensual, sensory and craft-like bent—than in an art of a purely conceptual and distanced nature. Having said that, I should mention that these endeavours have been part of my work since my first one-man show and have been included in almost all my shows ever since. I have found these works to be a considerable help and motivation in my reflection on my painting, creating a kind of dialectic between the painting, its workmanship, its rather contemplative content and its difficult historical context.

My more recent work in the multiple-media sphere is based conceptually on the hermetic concept so popular during the Renaissance, of the correlation between the microcosm (man) and the macrocosm (the world, the universe). Citing two seemingly disparate works by two great European artists from different periods, I reaffirm my affiliation to the pictorial tradition of the West. One of the images indicates my interest in receptacles as objects that are waiting for content and, by extension, in landscapes that represent a cavity, a pond, as in the case of Landscape with a Lake, for example. However, I try to suggest the same thing using the human figure.

I don’t know if I will continue making these “side works,” as you call them, since they do not originate from the same internal need as the paintings. They belong more to a need to justify than to show. To some extent, they constitute the exclusively cerebral, discursive, and strategic aspects of my work, its “cold” and “light” side, if you like, which is not to say that they lack a certain poetry.

The quotations, which are such a postmodern symptom, come from things that I appropriate, incorporate in my work: concepts, sayings, lists, fragments of things that I have read, works of art that nourish me.

In stark contrast to my paintings, it is hardly surprising that these “side works,” given their “technological” workmanship, the almost complete absence of craftwork in them, their impersonal and almost industrial finish, should seem more contemporary, bearing in mind the distanced stance and mediation characteristic of so many creations these days.

On the other hand, you could argue that the massive accumulation of letters, signs and words, which ends up conforming images in these works, to some extent echo the vast accumulation of pictorial dabs that produce the emergence of the image on the surface of my paintings.

These works appear to integrate themselves without difficulty, without raising suspicions or resistance in the artistic context of today. Almost impervious to contemporary prejudice, their appearance alone allows them, long before being understood (assuming they ever will be), to captivate and intrigue and usually to be accepted from the outset.

Fortunately…