ANTÓN LAMAZARES AT THE CGAC, A POLYMATH CREATOR IN 70 X 50 YEARS​

Antón Lamazares inhabits the real republic of art and, for a while, that monastery of white geometries by the extraordinary Álvaro Siza, called Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo. The world is moderated for a moment, and one feels how one acclimates to a desirable, peaceful, enjoyable reality, as if the non-existent stones were being sculpted in the daily rubbing of the monk’s pocket, after a life of 70 years, summarized in fifty years of sublime creation.

Antón Lamazares is a Laninense polymath, a workshop anchorite, a magician of shapes and colors, a brilliant evolutionary, with a formed and reflexive personality, and a sensitive and demanding human being, with a trajectory that brings together centuries of knowledge acquired through reading and half a century of expression in which the illuminations of each day have been added. He and his achievements represent a journey through time without improvisations, without losses and the evident demonstration of a trajectory of overcoming effort, study, research, discoveries and concretions.

Lamazarism” is a philosophy emanating from a path of deep traces, of perfectly identifiable stages, of observations, of rethinking, of reinterpretations, of encounters and misunderstandings with materials, textures, aesthetics and chromatics, varied but always recognizable, fruit of a coherence, of a conviction, of a process, of a consequent transformation of the author and his work, inserted in a definable, genuine style. All this is evidenced in the concordance of 230 works with which, for the second time in history, and after the inauguration of the space with works by Maruja Mallo, in 1993, curated by Pilar Corredoira, under the presidency of Manuel Fraga, the whole of the CGAC spaces are covered, in an excellent work by Antonio Gonçalves, who like Siza is a world eminence born in his brother and dear Portugal.

Between Maceira, in Lalín, and New York or Berlin or Madrid, between the village and the big city, between the here and the hereafter, between childhood and maturity, between the ironic and the outburst, there is the same apparent distance. In the case of Antón Lamazares, I have the impression that he looks at everything from the height of introspection, of perception, and reflects it with the curiosity and conviction of someone who has first understood the silence, the magic, the spirit, and incorporates it after processing it to his imaginary and ends up elevating his conclusions to materiality to offer it in the hubbub of the agora -not the market of the confused now, but the genuine-, as a synthesis of the infinite and mortal, of the local and universal, of the tangible and the imagined nature, of the proper and the transcendent, of life and death. Everything resembles, I repeat, a philosophy proclaimed from a glimpse, from a height in which one discovers a truth that is seen embodied in smooth or smooth surfaces, or breaks into materials with the force of a storm, or tries to play with risk, like an experiment that is not such. Everything is presented to the eye with a special interpretation of color that plays with the reflection of light. Elevated poetry that is framed in itself.

Lamazarismo” is the work of a seer, of a being of excesses, of a gallant barbarian, endowed with discernment, lucidity, perspicacity, sagacity, sharpness, intuition, sight, smell, talent, perspicuity, clarity, intelligibility, evidence, comprehensibility, of a worldly lalinense of cape and brush, of a student of Laxeiro – to whom he paid homage again by inaugurating a 23-F, day of the master’s birthday-.

Antón Lamazares resembles a poet monk, an anchorite philosopher. At least that is how I understand him, that is how I perceive him, and with the physical and intellectual distance that may separate us or find us, he always surprises me with his impossibility of inadvertence, even when he manages to moderate, to silence, others would say, the demands of his mind and his intellectual capacities, or manifests himself in his bizarre and wonderful Dolphin Alphabet.

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Alberto Barciela, Spanish journalist, is vice-president of EditoRed.

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