FERNANDO MASTRETTA ( Barcelona, 1961) Lot n° 32

FERNANDO MASTRETTA ( Barcelona, 1961) "Abstraction", 2005. Oil on canvas. Signed and dated on the back. Measurements: 195 x 196 cm. Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country, specializing in painting. His career has been characterized by a representation of an abstract but concrete reality, an oscillation that Calvo Serraller (1994) has summarized in a constant search: the beauty arising from the harmonization between passion and order. Humor, playfulness and a certain provocation, as well as the way of combining apparently contradictory elements under a harmonious whole that avoids the usual historicist interpretations. At the beginning of the nineties he works with large monochrome and uniform surfaces on which figures of people and animals are superimposed on a small scale. This stage is followed by another in which he creates landscapes of a more concrete character and a certain romantic breath, which can be inscribed in the wake of expressionism, simultaneously exuberant and structured. In the mid-nineties he carried out a series of decidedly abstract works in which the gesturality of the brushstroke adopts the impulsive ways of expressionism. Recently Fernando Mastretta has taken a new turn in his approach to painting. A perfect balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the representation of an abstract and concrete reality at the same time, a collection of great ideas, each one powerful and singular but that nevertheless do not cease to configure a coherent universe. As Fernando himself explains -Like the tamer and the lion, the painter must understand the very nature of painting in order to be able to tame it-. Painting is to some extent a wild animal and cannot be directed without first having listened to it. Fernando comments that he has voluntarily abandoned the myth of the "good savage" so influential in 20th century painting, and has become aware that the expressive possibilities of painting are in the painter who imposes himself on his nature.