Old Bilbao's Trend
Potxo Onandia's Bilbao Before Guggenheim cityscapes (1992) 
Potxo Onandia's Bilbao Before Guggenheim Cityscape 2 (1993)
Plenairist Potxo Onandia was exhibiting in 1996 his recent landscapes at Kreisler Gallery, Madrid. Most of them painted in his home's surroundings of Basque wilderness when he didn't travel around the world -- and the clock -- doing his frenetic painting against light. He felt bored that evening waiting for visitors when he suddenly thrilled. Being a tall guy himself, he saw entering the hall a gang of actual giants.<<<<<Among them, not so collosal left wing Biriúkov, a soviet-glasnost adquisition -- 1,98 -- for Real Madrid Basket Club. Soccer crack Butragueño, a.k.a "El Buitre", a conspicuous collectionist, had transmitted his adiction to nearest locker rooms. Biriúkov Aguirregabiria, also a Basque by motherline said: "I like this one, it's Ukraine". Onandia: "No, no, it's Itziar". "Ukraine". "Itziar". "Ukraine, how much?". "Well...OK. Yo win, pal">>>>>>>
He sold all the batch in Madrid, Onandia. Like some years before, 1992-1993, he had sold like hotcakes at Arteta Gallery, Bilbao, all the canvas serial with nowadays ghostly mirages, some of them showed in this entry, of this Biscay city as it used to be before controlated explosions and precocious retirements for the blue dungarees tribes took place. Stablishment had decided the destiny of a Basque Southampton bound to metamorphosize. From bodyworks in heavy metal and shipyards, Bilbao looked up -- a huge majority thinks that down, and still tells the press the contrary -- to gastronomics, art museums, conventions, stem cell and neutron spallation laboratories. Also, Queen Elizabeth's cyclic anchorages and, in a word, tourism. It's the epidemic mall-syndrom of economics and environmentalismania.
Nostalgy has always implemented another industry, between camp, kitsch and the blues. Young Bilbao needs retrospection perhaps just for an indigenous identity lost 15 years ago.Therefore, the trend of jurassic skylines as a window in the wall or a kind of time-machine became cool. Icy. I wrote an essay about that time of him, Potxo Onandia, and now I need to recall it and also tell his fans that I recently met him in the street and that told me that he's still got some of these paintings, forgotten -- by him-- in the garret. Also, pencil drafts about Bilbao-Before-Guggenheim. So let's hurry once again. I said I wrote it, but an old journalist told me once that an interview is a reporting kind where one writes and other takes up the dough. One of those nice and cynical reporters of typesetter's and Leica era, you know.
Back in the dockyards
When I attempt to get Onandia to recount to me his lifetime, as one would tell it when suspended between two floors in a skycrape elevator or in the hall of a strike-bound airport, or as if we were back in Bilbao's smoggy dockyards, this fierce expressionist painter says that he doesn't know how to express himself, when all his canvasses are pure expression, or expressionist impressionism, or whatnot, let's spare him the tags. So Onandia sums up with an "I remember that I coloured my brothers' paintbooks with 'Alpino' pencils". That's a quite nice start.
They still sell them, alpinos, you can see it in shop windows and it's quite true, you can visually breath them as Marshall Mac Luhan himself should accept as an olfative remembrance. It is a very concrete stroke upon which to base his self-fullfilment. All plastic art, no matter how personal can it be, emerges from the simplest root: 'Alpino' pencils, 'Milan' rubbers and 'Guarro' paper are data of a memory laden with trademarks. Just like bread and chocolate, in Basque Country they're not already used to teatime, nor -- it's a question of time -- to junk food or snacks.
Mathematical idiom
Bread and quince jelly skies, that's it. In before-Guggenheim-Bilbao era, a nice, cheap and nutritional humpback. Everybody, I mean, has lived a fairy teenstory and therefore now feels like an adultescent. Melodramatic (Dickens), Sadomasochist (Tom Thumb, Cinderella). The battle in the aftermath of the war. The Civil War, Corea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Malvines, Irak, Afghanistan, Somalia and so on. Young Onandia coloured untiringly everything he saw in black and white, or gray scale, that fell into his hands.
He would say later, at last: "Painting is light, colour is light. In ancient times perspective and geometry remitted to the absolute, Galileo said that the great world of Nature was written by the mathematical idiom". So did Fibonacci, and don't forget the Golden Number's worshippers. Onandia would occupy a period of his posterior life, in between two escapes to the horizon, painting meticulous geometries. In that still juvenile that is to say embryo painter, art continued to be a process, and if the results are beautiful it doesn't matter at all; that comes given as an addition. Moreover, the work once finished loses interest to the voracious creator; he throws it to the wolf pack of fetichists and inmediately seeks for other paths.
"On thursday afternoons", he says, "there was drawing class and that subject really interested me; I was mesmerized by the older students of the National School of Berango who performed marvels. They were actually merely copies, but it still dazed me". A vocation, as one can see is not a rocket, not a lightning in the way which strikes you down. It is rather the inavoidable need to emulate some overgrown children who to top it all do their opera badly and fraudulently.
Living photocopies
"It is terrible to say, but almost one hundred per cent of what is nowadays painted and sold is made by copying photos rather than from real life", he sights. We live in such a cybernetical life that it's no more that time is gold -- which it indeed is -- but to hurry itself as gold. Blatant copy as done by the fellow students of Potxo, today Onandia, has become legal tender. Exalted artists paint landscapes directly relying on the kodachrom or the photoshop.
However Potxo continues to board his jeep with its box, palette and easel. A road-story and maybe a beatnik attitude, never a pose. The value of his art, consequently, is that its works are artisan and energetic. He knew, he knows how to roam alone and recognise that it's a parody. He will paint this and that always on site but never makes pastiche nor instant, digital photography like portraits, and that's why a friend in common and also a painter, Juan Garro, portraited by him, said to us that "Potxo's portrait's are landscapes". We easily could say the viceversa, also.
Non-decorative art
The gaze of the artist from beneath the skin, the base of all the expressionism and to say expressionism is to say non-decorative art, can only arise from the face to face in two or ten days. Photography, and it's a photograher (also) who now writes, usually stops there in the hide and in the shirt, and for that almost all photoportraits seem to be after a few years like obituary photos you can find in tombstones under the scent of cypresses and sempervivums.
The introverted and telepathical Onandia portraits, otherwise, spring from the very focus that gives light to the eyes. It's the definitive brushstroke of the optical brilliance that so few know how to execute; a brushstroke which in the workshops of the Quattrocento was reserved for the master. The folds could be done by any. Yet, even the Greeks and Romane did them.
Watercolour time
"Then came watercolours", Potxo recollects. "I did many watercolours until I discovered oils". First, so, the box with its wells for indigo, ochre, vermillion, emerald green. Then the ultramarine blue and straight yellow. The combinations. The heady effluves of turpentine and the world as an everghanging casement; so kaleidoscopic that the attempts to ensnare it end up as a mythological race not against the clockworks of time, but rather against the sun, the cosmos, which is less controllable.
In the stimulating, suburban surroundings of Atxuri the neophyte Potxo Onandia attended Arts and Crafts. "I also studied mechanical drawing and descriptve geometry in the School of Quantity Surveyors. They wanted me, at home, to become a Quantity Surveyor because of family tradition in the matter of construction; but I wished to paint, to study Fine Arts. When I announced it to my parents there was a terrible row, it was a catastrophe!" Hereditary predestination uses to fail out, it upsprings a black sheep determined to discover its own pastures-- that is to say the eternal meadows of Euskal Herria, Asturias, Avignon, Segovia; wherever he should decide to halt using his big hunting boot as a brake.
"It's not learned"
Fine Arts was a form of initial selfaffirmation because "there I didn't learn to oilpaint; it's not learned, the truth is that you learn from what you go along observing". Potxo's father, he is not the only one, thought that Art was a profession for bohemians and he was not far out of the concept, only of the word. What really happens is that nobody stops to analyse exactly what is the significance of bohemian , nor of that other stern expression, "to be a man of gain", which to many of us seem so logical and sensible although it emanates from the most primitive social anthropofagy.
Chalk graffittist
That doesn't mean that to study in Quantity Surveyors did nor serve him for anything (although he was not there told that projective geometry is a prophane and arabic form of the sacred). But to enter into Fine Arts in Bilbao, where he finally enroled as the familiar storm abated, already constituted a desired trajectory ad a badge of identity.
It did'nt lead to anywhere, because universitarism and its following titulations, diploms and masters fulfills are no more than an admitted mixtification. Or alleatory beatification. Or a social standing. But as we have yet stated Onandia doesn't give a damn about the definite results of things. He is only keen on the creative art. The finished work nearly always has the sore pleasure of postcoitum. "When I enrolled in Fine Arts I felt the restlessness inside me but I didn't know where to direct it. In Quantity Surveyors some fellows told me... I also carried a copy book to class, full of drawings, and while we waited for the arrival of the teacher I used to fill the blackboard with drawings". Those coloured chalks were also a temptation for an Art hiperactivist.
Grafitti, also, we could say. The teachers inmediately took up note of that future Buonarotti who illustrated the common Sistine Chapel of a school for future building contractors and real state brokers. And as they ha plenty of common sense they openly said to him: "Why don't you enrole in Fine Arts?" Those were the days when the academies treated 18 years old youngsters formally. Onandia, the blackboard painter, soon changed rooms and his destiny.
Chakrasaramvaramandalas
"Except when I paint geometric figures those geometric drawings weren't of great use to me, I make my settings in a systematic manner". They don't suit. Those petty details remain for cave paintings like Leonardo's. "When I pass by a place and its images cause an impact on me, then I know what I'm going to paint. Sometimes I restraint myself, but it is something instintive and I'm more and more unattached to conventions. What I try to achieve is a unified balance of colours". He means an instantaneous perfectionism. An oil-done snapshot. Utopia.
The formula, also, rather than the image. Formulas to be drawn up. "Although, of course", he precises emphatically, "you can't digress from the pattern if you are going to introduce anything representational; still, and above all, comes the colour". His great geometric canvases are not an atonement. Nor a premise.
Although he doesn't try to analyse or stop to meditate about what could originate his drift or favoritism toward those entangled chakrasamvaramandalas in an euclidian version of fleeting symmetries, it seems to be, instead, a somewhat perverse revenge on the school of Quantity Surveyors. "At times when I had spent some days painting them", he explodes, "I had to paint a portrait of the first person who entered my vision land, just to act as a counterwight: I used to get very tense". No art without tension, let's remember.
Cyclope eye
Onandia's landscaping is the contrary. Freedom and aesthetic ease when his daily teaching hours, now he's a High School drawing teacher himself, finish. Teaching can be educative, he believes, and although highly stressed and anxious for a retirement that's not near he continues to believe so. "To leave class and start painting a landscape, that should be fine", he muses.
It is not that the live nature drawings of Onandia are placid or relaxing. Quite the contrary. In them even the rocks move and you find in them a disquieting, planetary absence of human beings on the settings. He places portraits out of the socalled ecologic milieu of the individual (anthropocentrism) and removes him, or her, from the Nature. Lost paradises.
Spectator imagines a cyclope eye, that of the author, covering all nuances for him alone. To communicate -- without devaluing it -- this enormous loneliness of nature as a momentary possession (ownership would exterminate magics: ownership is akin to marriage in the Garden of Eden) acquires betraying dimensions.
Great open spaces
"Of course, I idealize", he confesses without false outrage. "I idealize the landscape, and the cityscape, although in recent times I have a fixed idea: to paint parking lots. This will be done", it's his obsession, his mythological war against clepsydra until he gets 48 hours days, "when I have more free time". Onandia says that the teaching of high level technical drawing has given him liberty. He explains that it permits him to remain as a painter and relieves him of being the misunderstood bohemian to which his father was reffering.
He yearns, whatsoever, for the other out-of-cliché bohemian, the one that has no need for a lectureship to live on air soaked with turpentine. He symbolically states: "What most appeals for my imagination is the vegetation and great open spaces. I went to Castille searching for yellow colours".
Colour jamsession
As it was to be expected from the hyperactive, vigorous artist emerging like a firework display from the egg, conventional colours fell short for him. There is a base yellowish, and another chrome, and another lemon and so on up to the hundred. With green we suffer, in Basque Country, a similar illusion. So it is in Ireland, and "How Greeen Was My Valley" is just a synthetic retrospection of blue, gray, black and amaranth. He defines: "Thy don't sell in paint shops the yellows of Castille in september at six in the evening or thereabouts". Onandia is no realist, but for him reality is interpreted by the painter's eye for colour and it could be said that we all are somewhat daltonic when placed close to those doors of perception.
The artist's retina, then, improvises in-a-jiffy mixes. It's the jamsession of expressionism, the ragtime of postimpressionism, a mechanism born of an incessant search, brushstroke by brushstroke. Then another glance identifies itself where it has never been. But when it revealed where it has really beeen -- like when Moscu born and biscayan by origins basket crack Biriúkov identifies Basque Country, his mother's country, whith Ukraine -- then realism is produced that is not the real aim of Onandia. Although he has nothing against it.
A progressive enthusiasm
Returning to socalled yellow, Onandia admires "those tremendous wheatfields of the road from Valladolid to Segovia". Inborns, by the way, call them when the summer wind gets strong "The Sea of Castille", and you can see actually and down the mountains vegetal wawes. In our painter Potxo, it's an unequivocal feeling, everything constitutes progressive enthusiasm. He was intoxicated with the one-horse towns of France. He penetrated the mystic light of Asturias. He brought back home the Mexican exoticism and gulliverian mural paintings. Each day he receives a new revelation through the very window that awakes him.
He's able to hadle all the routines; he breaks, discovers and dynamizes them. He is sometimes a postbeatnik globetrotter -- "On the Road" -- and also sometimes donjuanish in his temporary settling downs. He eternizes each time and place that present themselves against his windscreen knowing that something is bound to crop up that will place previous pleasures that will put previous pleasures in the shade. And when he is forced to observe a sedentary existence he exercises the hereinbefore referred techniques of imagining that what is daily in permanent revolution.
The painter of landscapes or skylines just because of his function must be as the theatre actor, even radically shakespearian, who never recreates the same character even if he or she has been interpreting it for years and without adding or cutting a word of the original script. I'm not talking about Stanislawski or Bertolt Brecht or Actor's Studio, it's just because he or she who actually varies is the spectator. And if the spectator is always the same -- say the paintbrush-- he or she notices that the same is not identical to itself.
Says Potxo: "In painting, when an element or detail upsets the harmony of the layout, you ignore it, you eliminate it, you don't paint it and you sketch without it. I never go for a very figurative result, tying myself to what is seen; I try to sublimate it a little". Over the ensuing months of the long interwiew -- silence also talks -- he has at times used a key word: "self-restraint". And it was surely a restraint against his own audacity which bit by bit took charge of his creative, perceptive reins. The inhibition dissolved and with it all temptation of moralising and, of course, setting codes.
At present houses are the nearest to human things that this lover of wild nature reproduces in them. Bilbao Before Guggenheim canvases containings, moreover, seem paradoxically human --perhaps because we do perceive robotics behind them, and robots never walk alone --than desertic but inhabitated towns in the mountains or beaches. He couldn't, when he did his plenairism of a feery Bilbao bound to evanesce, obey to his predilect mania: "I don't avoid houses, but I do avoid people. Neither do I paint animals, I made an exception in the Square of Segovia: there are a kiosk and some persons there. But the remainder were walks. The Cathedral from all angles. I went above all looking for the light of Segovia from my base in a village called Zamarramala".
'Isms' and 'ismings'
Those are Onandia's objectives. The light of Segovia in Zamarramala, the changing lights of Bilbao in a process of destruction/constructivism and nothing else. He has never extracted from painting any other type of concession or compensation. When anyone, such as the writer of this essay, has heard so much nonsense about cosmic echoes, social rupturism, methapsychic vibrations, structures of the I-Myself-Project, earthly predestinations and other psychodramatics about ism and isming to which artists and now litterary people are inclined as if asking for permission to walk on earth (which is as much theirs as it it is of a nomad salesman or a pilot of boeings); when one has made an involuntary path into this mixtificated and mystificated cicle of pretexts, texts and contexts, meeting Onandia is like discoveing a kindred spirit.
Art doesn't need to explain itself in further terms than what it transferes, an let's insist in objective vision of spectator: any artist must walk the world with the spectator or the reader in the kit. When we talked, Potxo was not abducted by the trend, the trend came by itself, he hasn't fully noticed it and he hasn't changed.
"Be posthumous, Macbeth"
Precisely for this reason they began looking for him, they put him on show, they transported and transport him from Deba to Madrid, Bilbao, the Americas. "I have never proposed selling my first painting: up till last 1990s I have given the majority as gifts. But now I sarted to sell because obviously the paints, canvases and journeys by car from place to place..." He says it very seriously and nterwewer whishes to stress there is not the least hint of cynicism in these statements.
One has heard to believe. As it is never superfluous to add on a certain emphasis to increment the credibility, and let's listen to the following paradox, another, from the mouth of he that was originally destined to occupy a workpost in construction sector: "When I had to pay for this house I was left penniles. Teaching helped and gave me possibilities up to a point because I had to save from then on every dime and I passed throuh moments of not havingh dough even to buy paints". He points his finger to the garret: "I still have an abstract pinture which I painted with two little brushes and very little paint, one of that brushes having only two or three cadaveric hairs is still in my possession".
The baldness of necessity. A relic, we both hope. The bad examples are those failed eminences that the History of Art -- and Sotheby's -- puts on a pedestal with the impuding purpose of manipulating our sensitiviness. Be posthumous, Macbeth, they say, and thou wilt be rich!" They want us to imitate their penury, vices, crazyness and disastrous lives and deaths. In oblivion that the lives of saints are moreover good for other manners of seeking the absolute. Onandia is, as he himself autodefines, introverted. He likes to reside in the mountains; he is nevertheless no hermit.
Bad examples
An Art Gallery advised him so as "in Art one must make concessions..." It is a mercantilist point of wiew that even we bloggers suffer. And journalists, fiction writers, talk show stars and radio-TV commentariat: "We're short of time, ladies and gentlemen, be laconic!" It happens to Hollywood scripters. So it's up to us to imitate, again, the vangoghs and virginiawolves, the bad examples who died in misery because people who bought culture and puritans didn't understand them, and now are worth a fortune. Their skeletons are tycoons.
Our great challenge, having now a Guggenheim, an Artium, a Kursaal, a Reina Sofia and a joyous number of Intellectual Rewards, consists in that self-restraint to which Onandia stretches. Since Potxo said that he'd make concessions, but lied, and reaffirmated his way of doing what he wanted to do without interferences, he sold, as we already said, all the batch. It's the same that those editors who ask for easy writing "because folks don't read": it's better for the world to insist in your own style than to publish readings for illiterates.
Onandia draw his pictures of a Bilbao bound to radical restructuration because mind, dendrites, instinct or sensibility demanded it. Now, Bilbao Before Guggenheim skylines are trendy the same way as they were when he showed and sold them all at now forever closed "Arteta" Gallery. The boom, 1993, surprised him. Not me. You'd always be surprised when confronted with the afterwards of things you do by your bodymind satisfied exigency.
Baroja, Regoyos, Beorlegui, Oteitza...
The eye of an art broker is never orientative. Some dealers will resent this evidence. To them I can reply that they could never orientate the hirsute Ricardo Baroja, the vitriolic Beorlegui, the indomitable Regoyos, the iracund Van Gogh nor the rebel Oteiza -- a.k.a Oteitza -- because, among other reasons, the fact that all of them are, as living entities, prior to nowadays techniques of marketing and merchandising with intangible assets. They are -- they were -- of high value in their own right and that's precisely because they did no concessions. Nobody can give advice to the images of creativeness, nor to the greek poiésis.
Being authentically eccentric, Onandia still continues awaking to the reality that the matter of paintings, drawings, oil pictures -- his own -- enmeshes with an industry that once upon a time constituted the artisan's, the guild's and the freemason's expression of the Absolute. Then savvy Templar Knights came from the Crusades carrying with them all the architectural knowledge of Palestine muslims and instructed the Masters so to build Cathedrals. In Bilbao San Mamés soccer stadium is still known as "The Cathedral" of football.
If you read today's papers, you'll find in them the protest demostrations of peripherial inhabitants, because Guggenheim, the BEC, the River and all the core of the nowadays city is no more than a stage machinery with its Deus Ex Machina of Art and Intellectual divinities downstairs, while so much suburban infrastructures remain untouched and visibly underdeveloped. "We live in ghettos", those Bilbao's citizens denounce to the not so liked Major, Azkuna (PNV). So you've got now the touroperator's Bilbao, Abandoibarra, and the real Bilbao in margination. Sure, it happens anywhere, and perhaps it's the plug of nostalgies of an Old Bilbao rich in internal idiosincrasies, but without a so strict gap between neighborhoods.
Covetable goods
Time went by and expression in sculpture, paintings, carving, stained glass and all that candid expressionism of the primitive artists on board and panels gradually began to achieve the testimony of its universal moment and by the same way converting itself into covetable goods and legal tender. Onadia muses again: "I didn't realize then, but now I know it, now I'm aware". Anyway, today he' s more flexible, he evolves, but in his home made Daedalus. More proteal in his own tendency of making of his work his own inviolable world.
In a certain manner he is being invited ad incited to denude himself before lascive chimeras such as critics, art brokers, experts, collectors, exhibition (exhibitionism?)commissionaires, investors, museum jetset and sacred alchimists of truth. Not to mention specialised press, what's-cool-and-in tarotists and professional catalogue compilers. He realizes that things cannot be different because in the upshot painting is essentially communication in a world where conversation, communication and oral wisdom is no more vis a vis, but filtered through the media, that is, the mediums of glamour, and where oil-sheiks begin to crave for Art as they did long time ago for yatches and jewels.
In a figurative sense Onandia resides calmly in his own private Francocantabric cavern and now sees and hears people enter the mouth of the grot. One has to be strong for that kind of task. In spite of all the remains untouched, he may become the success-story of the new art which is alien to brands. Perhaps he doesn't know, but his now Bilbao Before Guggenheim paintings are high on middle citizens desire's underground stock changes. Only cattle are branded and Onandia continues still unbranded and untamed. His pictures are the proof.
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Etiquetas: Guggenheim blocs
posted by Rafael Castellano de la Puente | 9:58 AM
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