EDUARDO ARR ANZ- BR AVO
EDUARDO ARRANZ- BRAVO
Vital Lines
F R A N K L I N B OW L E S G A L L E R I E S San Francisco / New York
LEFT:
FRONT
Tribu 2014 oil on canvas 51 x 51 inches COVER : RE-memory 2014 oil on canvas 57 x 44 inches
Line can create dimensionality or just as easily take it away…
E DUA R DO A R R A N Z - B R AVO : V ITA L L I N E S
Fig. 1: Pantocrator (detail), Sant Climent de Taüll, c.1123
Fig. 2: ANTONI GAUDI Park Güell Building Roof (detail) Barcelona 1885-1890
OPPOSITE :
Europa, My Baby (detail) 2014 - see page 59
The fertile imagistic and cultural ground of Catalunya is omnipresent in Eduardo ArranzBravo’s paintings; from the gravely expressive and austere Romanesque murals of Sant Climent de Taüll (Fig. 1) and Gaudi’s pulsating, organic architectural forms visible throughout Barcelona (Fig. 2), to the many manifestations of Dalí’s disturbing Surrealist imagination (Fig. 3) and Miró’s colorful biomorphic shapes and electrifying black lines seen gesturing across stark dry fields (Fig. 4). Strong resonances with the potent figuration and confident structure of Picasso’s art are likewise inevitable (Fig. 5). Andalusian by birth, Picasso spent his formative years in Barcelona and later showed works at the same renowned gallery as Miró—the Sala Gaspar—which welcomed ArranzBravo in 1966 when he was only twenty-four. But beyond these co-existing stylistic affinities, there is a palpable boldness, an irreverent energy and sense of earthy defiance that undergirds the continuum of Arranz-Bravo’s work, and seems to bespeak a certain regional spirit of resistance and connection to the land. The artist’s mode is fierce, rebellious, festive and fantastical, in
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turns—a hybrid sensibility which seems steeped in, and inseparable from, the historic decades of Catalan experience under the Franco dictatorship and its aftermath. Or, maybe Arranz-Bravo’s dark expression should be linked further back—and further from home—to the soil of Francisco Goya’s audacious and anguished black paintings (Fig. 6), archetypal images of irrationality and madness, which the Catalan artist acknowledges as some of his favorites.
Fig. 3: SALVADOR DALÍ The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft...(detail) 1934
EAB: Nou de nou II 2013
Indeed, Arranz-Bravo can be seen as inheriting the mantle of a long line of modern masters from the Iberian Peninsula, which begins with Velasquez and extends to Antoni Tàpies (Fig. 7). Over the course of the last several decades, Arranz-Bravo’s paintings, drawings and sculptures Fig. A: Mural painted by EAB for Escola Fig. 4: JOAN MIRÓ Ma de Proverbis II 1970 have been collected and Ramon y Cajal in L’Hospitalet shown, not only in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum, but also in many other prestigious international institutions and exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, Brazil. The artist has also left his mark on a multiplicity of media: illustrated books, theater sets and collaborations with poets. His impressive murals and sculptures (Fig. A / B) activate the cityscape in and around Barcelona, and his famous Tipel Factory (a collaboration with Rafael Bartolozzi from 1968-69) in Parets del Vallès has been historically landmarked. With Tàpies’ recent passing in 2012 (and the earlier deaths of Picasso and Miró), Arranz-Bravo remains the only living Spanish artist to have his own foundation, a platform he uses generously to introduce and support emerging contemporary artists. In all senses, he represents a Spanish national treasure. At the same time, however, it can be argued that ArranzBravo’s practice, like Picasso’s before him, transcends any sense of place, and that its formal concerns and expression are, and
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Fig. 5: PABLO PICASSO La Durmiente 1947
EAB: Two Women 2006
have always been, part of an international—even global—art historical context. He is as well-versed in Cervantes and Baudelaire as he is in contemporary art and architecture. His most recent studio (Fig. C) was built by Jordi Garcés, the world-renowned architect who designed the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. This is yet another testament to his cosmopolitan perspective. Certainly never a provincial, after finishing his studies at the Sant Jordi Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona in 1961, Arranz-Bravo spent a year of artistic training in London, and further time in Paris and Italy. Subsequently, working in and around Barcelona during the tumultuous and inspiring period of the 60s and 70s, Arranz-Bravo not only knew Miró, Dalí and Tàpies well, but associated himself with avant-garde collectives and extremely progressive dealers and patrons. Later, living in the vibrant international community of Cadaques during the 1980s, his circle of friends and acquaintances included the Fig. 6: FRANCISCO GOYA A Pilgrimage EAB: Nou de nou VI (detail) 2013 Swiss artist, Dieter Roth, the to San Isidro (detail) 1819-23 American-born R.B. Kitaj, and the British artist, Richard Hamilton. It was this generation of artists that could be broadened to include others like George Baselitz, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Marisol Escobar and Philip Guston (almost all now deceased) who addressed the Post-War period with an existential tenacity and stubborn insistence upon figuration. Practicing in a mode of extreme imagistic liberation that we might now describe as: abstracted, sardonic, Fig. 7: ANTONI TÀPIES Dietari núm 2002 EAB: Venus II (detail) 2014 s e n s u a l , h u m o ro u s , f r a n k , sometimes pop or even vulgar, these artists tasked themselves with offering an expressive and unblinking assessment of the human condition—neuroses, desires, foibles and all. Over the last fifty years, Arranz-Bravo’s particular engagement with figuration has been manifest in myriad ways and across multiple media. Nevertheless, as the artist informs us, “I think the human figure is present in all my work.” Significant 20 th century touchstones for this modality have included: Picasso, from his Pink Period paintings to Guernica, DeKooning’s fleshy surfaces, the attenuated vulnerability of Giacometti’s sculpture (Fig. 8), Malevich’s experimental planar qualities and graphic colors, Dubuffet’s childishly-splayed-out human forms and scraffitti’d surfaces and, more recently, Brice Marden’s Asian-inspired calligraphic tracery and monochromatic segments.
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But Arranz-Bravo’s visual language is more complex and catholic still. He absorbs and translates plastic elements—wooden African masks and statuary, totems, patterns of Amerindian textiles and pottery, praying figures and Aboriginal journeys, ancient monoliths and carvings—to bring an elemental energy and metamorphic charge to his work. Sometimes imbued with a space-age machine aesthetic, many works can be described as darkly Futuristic (from beyond our time or even our known universe) but could simultaneously be read as schematic maps of villages or constellations, seen through ancient eyes. Similarly, some sections have an inside-out quality that evokes an xray radiograph, a magical, non-western sensitivity to the organic interiority of the body and mind. They do not repeat. Arranz-Bravo sets for himself the same goal again and again—to create a parallel reality and achieve an equilibrium, or dialogue, of the tensions within. But it is with an urgency of renewal and path-finding that he begins each work. According to the artist, it is the interior dynamic of the painting itself, which speaks through the process, that demands what it wants and needs from him.
Fig. B: EAB’s Europa, 2014, installed outside the Barcelona International Convention Center
Perhaps the most significant and compelling thread running through Arranz-Bravo’s work is the artist’s strikingly diverse and accomplished use of line, usually in dyadic colors of white or black, elsewhere in ribbons of orange-red or blue. Lyrical yet rigorous, his line is used to mark, make, trace and impose form. ArranzBravo’s line twists and turns calligraphically, then enacts geometry and becomes architectonic, only to loosen up elsewhere, pooling, pulling and whipping around, like an angry Möbius strip. His swift lines define, shift, dance and move, challenging the parts of each composition. Some surfaces appear scratched or gouged like an ancient tablet carved with heavy glyphs. In others, delicate etching reveals the inside of an organism with the transparency of jellyfish, or suggests an aerial view of nocturnal city lights. Line can create dimensionality or just as easily take it away, turning into a snaking pattern of sacred dots around a flat ochre surface, as raw as a punctured hide. At other times, Arranz-Bravo’s line graphically maps what seems to be sky or ground, or stretches across a human or animal form like netting or some kind of perspectival diagram. The suavity of his line defines and describes, entangles, elaborates and decorates, contrasts and converses, within his color-saturated worlds of land, sun, and the depths of human thought and feeling.
Swiss artist Paul Klee once described drawing as “a line that goes out aimlessly for a walk.” This is a humorous declaration describing something of the insistent, agitated, wiry movement of his own lines Fig. C: The new studio wing and other scraffitti’d techniques, but also relates to the restless nature of his constant artistic ponderings and experimentation, tendencies shared by Arranz-Bravo. Of course, Klee’s work (Fig. 9) is much less lighthearted or simple than this statement claims. His drawings of human figures are frequently layered with darker meaning or tinged with a sadness of the absurd, which unfolds to offer an expanded perception that penetrates the heart of life. Fellow painter, Oskar Schlemmer, once said of Klee, “He can reveal his entire
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wisdom with the barest of line.” Arranz-Bravo, too, manages to articulate and suspend the polarities of light and dark, the tragic and comic duality of modern existence in the poise of his hand. In several interviews, Arranz-Bravo has raised the question, “When he had not even mastered the means of daily survival, why did pre-historic man spend time drawing his hand, blowing some kind of pigment on the wall of his cave?” Not merely rhetorical or cursory, this query’s elemental profundity seems to lie at the heart of Arranz-
Fig. 8: ALBERTO GIACOMETTI La Chat 1951
EAB: Ginestero 2013
Bravo’s constant metaphysical search, impelling him daily to rise early, return to the studio and converse afresh with his canvases. Each day provides an opportunity to wrestle with the human condition and resume his quest. “I do not try to paint like Arranz-Bravo….I am constantly searching for a painting I haven’t painted yet.” This is not an analytic or intellectual exercise, but instead a physical encounter—rigorous, experimental, visceral. The artist would be the first to remind us, “I paint things with my stomach rather than my head.” That is to say, the artist paints from his gut, his instinct and with his guard down. It is a primal and ritualistic process of surrendering fully to the act of creation, “of being brave enough to fight with the white canvas for illusion.” At times, he waits for hours until he is moved to gesFig. 9: PAUL KLEE Senecio 1922 EAB: Two II (detail) 2014 ture, to inflect, to respond and to resolve a pictorial struggle. In this way, we should see Arranz-Bravo as a man of bold, but focused action, a warrior addressing humankind across the ages and staring down his own mortality through his art. Arranz-Bravo’s line brings energy to the canvas, electrifying its ground with pathos, spirit, fuerte. For him, this vital line not only connects his current efforts back to the memory of a younger self (9 years old, with pencil in hand just beginning his artistic journey), but to the terrain, the path, the trajectories of broader human history. Through his work, Arranz-Bravo symbolically reaches back to press his hand against the life force embedded in the Neolithic drawing at Altamira, and at the same time gestures forward, creating his own long and continually evolving imprint; a legacy for mankind, and especially for artists of the future. He can not live any other way. – L ARISSA B AILIFF, New York-based Art Historian and frequent lecturer for the Museum of Modern Art.
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O I L PA I N T I N G S
Super 2014 oil on canvas 78 x 78 inches
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At-chis 2013 oil on canvas, diptych 58.5 x 117 inches
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To Listen 2014 oil on canvas 25 x 19.5 inches
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Tender I 2014 oil on canvas 58.5 x 58.5 inches
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Upa 2013 oil on canvas 25 x 59 inches
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Magic Sea 2014 oil on canvas 68 x 31.5 inches
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Nou de nou IV 2013 oil on canvas 57 x 18 inches
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Rod贸 2013 oil on canvas 57 x 44 inches
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LEFT:
Big Bird 2013 oil on canvas 78 x 78 inches RIGHT:
Going Up 2014 oil on canvas 57 x 18 inches
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Spain 2014 oil on canvas 16 x 16 inches
Tender IV 2014 oil on canvas 35 x 12 inches
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Tender II 2014 oil on canvas 51 x 51 inches
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ABOVE : LEFT:
Helmuti 2013 oil on canvas 24 x 15 inches
She Likes 2014 oil on canvas 78 x 78 inches
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Sweden 2014 oil on canvas 58.5 x 58.5 inches
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Edison in the Garden 2014 oil on canvas 58.5 x 117 inches
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LEFT:
Bob 2013 oil on canvas 101 x 51 inches RIGHT: Man in Love 2014 oil on canvas 57 x 44 inches
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La MĂ 2012 oil on canvas 7 x 9 inches
Espum 2014 oil on canvas 12 x 12 inches
Mama-Bird 2012 oil on canvas 15 x 24 inches
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Nou de nou II 2013 oil on canvas 78 x 78 inches
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Nou de nou XI 2013 oil on canvas 58.5 x 117 inches
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Mirar 2012 oil on canvas, diptych 17 x 21 inches
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Enamorada 2012 oil on canvas 39 x 18 inches Tender III 2014 oil on canvas 48 x 11 inches
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Fortune 2014 oil on canvas 58.5 x 58.5 inches
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Matina 2012 oil on canvas 58.5 x 58.5 inches
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Martine 2013 oil on canvas 24 x 15 inches
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Mare 2012 oil on canvas 62 x 94 inches
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Nou de nou VI 2013 oil on canvas 26.5 x 10.5 inches
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Nou de nou VII 2013 oil on canvas 76 x 37 inches
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Two Women 2006 oil on board 21 x 15 inches
Portrait 2012 oil on canvas 19.5 x 25 inches
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Nou de nou XIV 2013 oil on canvas 32 x 68 inches
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Bianca 2012 oil on canvas 10.5 x 8.5 inches
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Permi II 2014 oil on canvas 16 x 16 inches
Montaigne 2014 oil on canvas 19.5 x 19.5 inches
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The Catalan 2014 oil on canvas 78 x 78 inches
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Big Love 2014 oil on canvas 59 x 25 inches
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La Natura 2012 oil on canvas 39 x 31.5 inches
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Dolio 2013 oil on canvas 58.5 x 117 inches
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Verd is Not Green 2013 oil on canvas 39 x 25 inches
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Yes-Yes 2014 oil on canvas 59 x 25 inches
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Olimpus 2014 oil on canvas 10.5 x 26.5 inches
Poema Doble 2012 oil on canvas 25 x 39 inches
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Five O'clock 2014 oil on canvas 24 x 15 inches
El Valent 2012 oil on canvas 28 x 21 inches
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Nou de nou X 2013 oil on canvas 57 x 18 inches
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I do not try to paint like Arranz-Bravo‌ I am constantly searching for a painting I haven’t painted yet.
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Marcel 2014 oil on canvas 47 x 51 inches
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The Happy Victory 2013 oil on canvas 76 x 126 inches
SCULPTURE
Ginestero 2013 bronze 10.5 x 29 x 7 inches
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Europa, My Baby 2014 bronze 35 x 20 x 6 inches
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WORKS
Altres Questions I
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ON
PA P E R
Altres Questions
2013 paintings on paper 26 x 46 inches
Altres Questions II
Altres Questions III
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Paradise
Paradise I
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Paradise II
2014 paintings on paper 22 x 30 inches
Paradise III
Paradise IV
Paradise V
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Two 2014 watercolors
Two I 14 x 9 inches
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Two II 19 x 14 inches
Two III 21 x 14 inches
Two IV 21 x 14 inches
Two V 21 x 14 inches
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Venus
Venus I
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Venus II
2014 paintings on paper 22 x 30 inches
Venus III
Venus IV
Venus V
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People in Love 2014 paintings on paper 19.5 x 15 inches
People in Love I
People in Love II
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People in Love III
People in Love IV
People in Love V
People in Love VI
People in Love VII
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Tipo Human 2012 oil on canvas 31.5 x 25 inches
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INDEX OIL PAINTINGS At-chis Bianca Big Bird Big Love Bob The Catalan Dolio Edison in the Garden El Valent Enamorada Espum Five O'clock Fortune Going Up The Happy Victory Helmuti La Mà La Natura Magic Sea Mama-Bird Man in Love Marcel Mare Martine Matina Mirar Miss Verite Montaigne Nou de nou II Nou de nou IV Nou de nou VI Nou de nou VII Nou de nou X Nou de nou XI Nou de nou XIV Olimpus Permi II Poema Doble Portrait RE-memory Rodó Seven More She Likes Spain
10-11 43 18-19 46 28 45 48-49 26-27 52 34 30 52 35 19 56-57 23 30 47 15 30 29 55 38-39 37 36 33 Back cover 44 31 16 39 40 53 32-33 42-43 51 44 51 41 Front cover 17 72 22-23 20
Super Sweden Tender I Tender II Tender III Tender IV Tipo Human To Listen Tribu Two Women Upa Verd is not Green Yes-Yes
8-9 25 13 21 34 20 70 12 Title pages 41 14-15 49 50
SCULPTURE Europa, My Baby Ginestero
59 58
WORKS ON PAPER Altres Questions I Altres Questions II Altres Questions III Paradise I Paradise II Paradise III Paradise IV Paradise V People in Love I People in Love II People in Love III People in Love IV People in Love V People in Love VI People in Love VII Two I Two II Two III Two IV Two V Venus I Venus II Venus III Venus IV Venus V
60 61 61 62 62 63 63 63 68 68 68 69 69 69 69 64 64 65 65 65 66 66 67 67 67
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FALL PROJECT
2014 MANAGERS:
Stacey Bellis / Emilee Enders C ATA L O G
DESIGN:
D. Lee Myers
LEFT:
Seven More 2014 oil on canvas mounted on wood 83 x 9 inches
OPPOSITE :
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Venus IV 2014 - see page 67
$40.00
Miss Verite 2012 oil on canvas 58.5 x 58.5 inches
FRANKLIN B OW L E S GALLERIES 765 / 799 BEACH STREET SAN FRANCISCO CA 94109 / 415.441.8008 / 800.926.9535 349 GEARY STREET SAN FRANCISCO CA 94102 / 415.441.8008 / 800.926.9535 431 WEST BROADWAY NEW YORK NY 10012 / 212.226.1616 / 800.926.9537
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