La tierra está desierta y vacía

One morning in late June I received an email. Sònia Villegas was preparing an exhibition of Ramon Herreros, the first in quite some time. A few days earlier she had been in his studio selecting the paintings with him. A friend and I helped them move the works, listening to why one painting was chosen and another was not. The email was from her. She proposed that I write the catalogue text for the exhibition. My first reaction was surprise, then doubt. I told Ramon about it and he said that if I felt like doing it, I should. In the more than forty years that Ramon has been exhibiting, no one had ever asked me to write a text. It seemed logical to me; I am too close to his work and to him. But that was precisely what had led Sònia to think of me. In the end, I accepted. The eleven paintings presented at El Principal de Còrsega have been selected with great care to show the evolution of a painting that moved from abstraction to figuration while remaining recognisable and personal. The earliest work dates from 1989, an abstraction in which the desire for figuration already flutters in that black leaf floating at the top. There is another abstract painting from 1992; it is one of the works from “El axioma de María”, the evocative title of a series presented at Galería Maeght in Barcelona in 1992. Two paintings from the 1990s represent the leap from abstraction to figuration. They are figurative works, but by no means naturalistic. “La espera – I”, from 1995, shows a woman sitting in the void reading a book. Two colours dominate the painting: the grey tones of the background against which the illuminated figure waiting stands out. “La tierra está desierta y vacía”, from 1997, is for me one of the most important works in Ramon’s oeuvre. The sleeping woman who dreams, covered by a mantle the colour of the earth with a palm tree against a blue background, is one of his most mysterious and fascinating paintings. “La ofrenda de Turín – IV”, dated 2001, is one of his most serene works. One could never tire of looking at that sleeping dog at the feet of a calm seated woman. By contrast, the two paintings titled “Alicia”, from 2002–2003, are bold portraits of a woman proud to be herself, a woman whose power and strength Ramon knows how to capture. If figuration fluttered in the first painting, in “Constelaciones”, from 2004, it is abstraction that attempts to emerge in a magical combination between a pomegranate — the most sacred fruit — and the constellation of Orion shining in the spring night sky. Magic, mystery, something sacred is what we see, already suggested by its title, in “La cazadora de rocas”, from 2003–2004, a physical and tangible painting in which the sensuality and humanity of the model rest on the structural solidity of a rock. The final two paintings selected for this exhibition date from 2011 and 2013. They are architectural paintings. “Monasterio de Leyre” invites us to speak in silence and take shelter beneath the black tree, perhaps listening to a distant Gregorian chant. “El árbol filosófico” brings together the square form of a building and the organic form of a dry tree. Their conjunction fully justifies the title of the work. I am not an art critic, and therefore my approach to painting is emotional, even sentimental. I am very grateful to Sònia for selecting these paintings and for giving me the opportunity to share a thought that until now I had kept to myself. This is not an anthological exhibition, nor does it pretend to be, but it does return to the public the many Ramon Herreros that have existed over these forty years. Those who know him will recognise him; those discovering him for the first time may not forget him. Nuria Vidal