BOLUMAR IN ESSENCE-XLV ANIV. IN THE BBAA

Dear reader, talking about the character of Luis Bolumar Santamaria, (Segorbe 1951) and his dedication of XLV years to the BB.AA requires a retrospective look at his trajectory, at his most perennial influences. A fundamental plastic artist to understand the artistic evolution of the contemporary Castelló history in the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, framed in the Valencian global spectrum, from its interior regions to the capital of Túria. A vision as personal as his long and varied artistic career, original and intrinsic, owner of his own style. A whole life dedicated to the palette and the brush in a trade learned in a selftaught way, reflected both in his pictorial creations and in his ceramic and sculptural production. Special mention should be made of screen printing and engraving for its iconographic exaltation, depuration and mastery.

More than 45 years have passed since his first solo exhibition and he has not fainted in his effort to paint, to create, to achieve his personal dream and the path of freedom through his commitment to art. But as in all the stories of artists hu-bo a first time in a room referring to that time, the Círculo Mercantil (1973) with its paintings hung, numerous public and an intellectual support of exception, the favorite son of the capital of the Plana, the poet Miquel Peris i Segarra. Descriptor in his poetic work of an interesting semblance of the universe of Bolumar:

“To defuse reality and to walk the roads of the dream, it does not do who it wants, but who can. Confirmed by the bonds of the consumer society, man, -Prometeo etern-, strives to escape and find ways without finding them. Only his spirituality will allow him to free himself.

With his hippy world of now, Bolumar, our young painter, continues to dream but scouring earth. Those weird, static forms, of the last thematic, -vitalist and contestant in the face of the “estaquirot” that arose in any corner-, are more human because they already know that statism, the enjoyment of life with all its completeness, only can be achieved with the world of work. Who could be “pitera” plant! And so he sneaks and smiles with his sister’s mother, harvesting flowers and more flowers, offering to love the fruit of the effort with the joy of those who refuse him all to live freed of all kinds of repressions, It is, justified, the essence of the enchimera, rebuilt with dreams, always floating, the prairies and bourglics of spirituality.

That the Dionysian forms give him to drink the bittersweet juice of “pampolosos” vines to take more and more up the creative spirit by approaching it where the ancient gods live who forgive everything when everything is addressed, with sincerity, to be able to combine with Nude beauty “

The story of his personal growth was gestated in a cultural movement lived in an experience prior to his first show. His passion for painting matched his desire to know the ins and outs of creators from the “underground” perspective, to take to the streets with the easel under his arm, canvas, pigments, oils, brushes ... and rickety backpack as the only luggage. Walk along the asphalt to the “Parnassus of Art” of the first 70’s, the Cau de L’Art of the summer solstice in the Llucena mountain. A home for artists led by the poet Miquel Peris in difficult times for artistic activity, reflected from the most varied manifestations.

Peris created a particular “performance” halfway between the theatrical expression, classical music and the transformism in clothing, a revolution for creativity in the making. A libertarian oasis despite living still under the Francoist aegis, a song to the happy life of its inhabitants. Live music, poetic recitals, rapsodas with a soundtrack of the rumor of the waters of the ravine. A haven of peace to paint a hermit with flowered beards called Ripollés, the young Lorenzo, the hippie Massó, the ceramist Safont and the visits of future culture referents such as Terenci Moix and Pau Casals. A few complicated years where the sky was touched by artistic and literary production while Bolumar reaffirmed his influence of the classics with his inspiration in the Greco-Latin sources. A figuration reinterpreted under his brush, sometimes impregnated with a crochet where the landscapes, per-sounds and symbols intermingle, imitating the lining of the marble. Others with varied architectural forms, mythological scenes and ornamentation of wreaths and candies, an imaginary that will never leave during his pictorial career.

From Mythological Fauno To The Female Icon

As the critic Felipe Mª Garín recounted in 1989, “unraveling the artistic expression of Bolumar reminds me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s reflections on Classical Art” ... “as Greek did not conceive a landscape, a world without human settlers hands, without men or humanized gods ... of all of which were support or more than frame .. “. The painting by Luis Bolumar deepens into a lascivious mythological world inhabited by fauns, beings represented as human figures with pointed ears, horns, goat legs ... or winged, and androgyny. An ambiguity manifested in an identitary universe where the masculine and the feminine intermingle, the obsessions reflected in some cases in the integral nude, highlighting the virile member.

His evolution towards the eternal feminine manifests itself in the first nymphs painted in voluptuous forms, without his characteristic slanted eyes, reflecting his gaze on the essence of the classics. From here she is maturing in her effort to represent another different woman, owner of her femininity that allows her to play any role that empowers her empowerment. A spirit that is contagious from its expressive, romantic brushstroke that defines the voluptuousness of beauty with primitive motherhood. The naked as the mirror of the soul. the colorful sensuality of an outfit or a symbol, wrapped in the resounding flesh of the females playing with the cold and warm chromatic ranges to transport you to your dreams. Later, with the characteristic women with slanted eyes, Bolumar recreates in arabesques, glazes and full color details.

Return To The Intellectual World

More than twenty years of artistic creativity have gone by with more successes than without flavors, growing in experience and maturity in their evolution through national and international art galleries until the end of the 20th century, never leaving aside the commissions of illustration with an intellectual support. A legacy appreciated by the artist, collaborating with his friends in the sphere of narrative and poetry, highlighting his serigraphs for the chronicler of the city, Professor Antonio Gascó, in The Sound of Color (1994). The etchings for Los cuatro elementos (1996) by the visual artist Rosanna Zaera, the commissions for the poet Rosa M. Villarroig, in Las cuatro estaciones (1995), or the poet Marcelo Díaz in La luna presente (1997), with an identity expressed in the form of aquatints.

A separate world is shaped by his close sentimental relationship with his homeland Segorbe, and with his greatest reference of letters and thought the writer Max Aub. The commission of his foundation and the knowledge of the intellectual experienced by the artist have led to the creation of the illustrations of his Poems translated (1998), and his Certain stories (1999), embodied in two commissions in the form of etchings. Nobody has been able to reflect in such a precise way an artistic task for the exiled writer, a reference framed in a personal identity that is essential to transfer the international projection of the republican exile to all of Europe and Mexico.

Just started the XXI century exposed in the Castell dels Ducs d’Híjar to return back to Cau de L’Art (2006), refounded by a server where painting, poetry and music were meeting year after year. He does not do it alone, he accompanies Melchor Zapata in this meeting where he shows in a new collection more than 20 canvases, serigraphs and prints. A resounding success of public and critics for Bolumar accompanied by Margarita Porcar, vice-rector of culture of the UJI, in this very peculiar meeting with other intellectuals and artists. He also participates in his next edition, celebrating with his work the homage to the alchemist of ceramics, the Mandenonean ondense. An evening in which the poet of l’Alcalatén, Romà Bernad, accompanied by the classical guitar of Rafael Carrillo, recited the original poem

El Foc Sagrat

“Of the color and the form to the texture, the matter of the woman: goddess fragrant, benign, vestal custody of sacred fire.

The voluptate spreads by the asceticism of the brush ...

We feel the painter of women who are alone ambushed in dreams of entertaining clarity, and we are high in the procelous sea of the stripped canvas.

Shipwrels by joyous vertigo lines, Winding meanders of the crossing, until sirens of light lead us like headlights to an unknown port, far beyond suffering.

From his window being, Eros shouts us by our name and with an excessive eagerness, to dilute ourselves in pure exuberance of pigments, which burst through the eyes. Sit-down, we drink with anxious glopades the spell, the blood that cracks in its palette, deliqüescence that is spilled into the female chalice where the tonalities of hope lighten ». (Román Bernad)

A sad closing for his journey through Llucena for the loss of Mayor Vicent Nebot (2011) one of the drivers of the return of culture to the pearl of the mountain. The undersigned, linked to his person and the population, was very affected, receiving first-hand a confidence in a policy of our city. A fact known to his widow Mari Carmen Negre without revealing the author. Someone left him “Twelve Red Roses” on his deathbed as a farewell. A personal and poetic gesture that was never made public. A leitmotiv to convey to the artist Bolumar the peremptory need to create a painting dedicated to Vicente with the Roses as a symbol. The painter portrayed his personality like no one, a humble peasant dreaming alongside the Twelve Red Roses. Plus a prosaic text written by me in his memory, and delivered to his family as a posthumous tribute. Today we unveil the secret, who bequeathed the Twelve Red Roses to Vicent Nebot Gargallo. A politician woman, Amparo Marco Gual, regional deputy-partner of Vicent in Les Corts Valencianes.

FROM BENICÀSSIM TO TAIWAN AND VICE VERSA.

The collaborations with another cultural manager and stage director such as Antonio Arbeloa were left for posterity in a volume edited by the publications service of the Provincial Council, and in the book of poems illustrated by Bolumar, Paseo Alegria (2010). You have to look back, forty years ago to remember the summer holidays next to the Tower of Sant Vicent with musical background of torn strings, Havana and poetry. That time was different because of the pictorial emergence of the Bernad Tower exhibitions, in which a large number of collectors congregated. Little by little they have left us those protagonists of the cultural life like Paco Puig and Lorenzo. An evanescent memory accompanies him while he paints next to the Coloma de las Villas de Benicàssim. Today, that nostalgia of yesterday has been reconverted by the current success of its irruption in the Asian market. In the north of Taiwan, 85 pieces have been moved for a monographic exhibition by the artist, 65 canvases and 20 prints, in the city of Hsinchu. A sample curated by the collector Chris Chang becoming the largest in the career of Bolumar.

As he himself said, “they are enthusiastic about the bold and imaginative use I make of the color and shapes that I have created over so many years.” «being curious as of cultures so far away we can understand ourselves through Art, since creation is universal and does not understand borders»

A maxim for this plethoric artist, trapped in the jaws of pictorial maturity and winged in a golden bird that lands in Madrid full of experiences for his Taiwanese journey. With the jet-lag anchored in the psyche, the artist succumbs to the nostalgia of a silver sea by walking alone on the beach of Benicàssim, in an ascending fusion with the universe by the force of the moon star. Thinking of a paradise longed for by those who can not feel the roar of the breakwater on cold winter nights. One dawn where the bluish full moon has gradually dyed red, to become a reddish moon of blood. An unrepeatable astrological phenomenon for the retinas and turned into an almost spiritual lunar eclipse. He evokes this experience as he did more than twenty years ago, an inspiration of yesteryear led him to the influence of the moon. An ancestral wisdom embodied in the empirical science of the lunar universe to develop the imagination and later, translate it into a canvas in an intense experience capable of affecting moods. Influenced by this channeling, the artist Bolumar has recreated a lunar crescent quarter of female stigma sustained between us by an androgynous and dreaming being. Riding between the divine and the human, because reverie and astral contemplation only belong to the universe of the artist. Share this cosmological vision in one of the most beautiful prints created by his palette and brush, converted into an etching full of arabesques, ornaments and cheating.

Contemplated the Marenostrum again unties in his head the solstice of the fire of an unfinished summer, of the youth of unleashed passions between Carrica and Segorbe. The birth and growth of his muses in Castellón parallel to the unforgettable memory of his Aphrodite submerged in the silver sea of this bittersweet morning. While the waves of the sea break and devour the intricacies of memory, he wakes up from a “flashback” that succumbs to his anxiety and returns alone to his workshop in the central street of Caballeros.

« ...Washed my foot against your moon chest

With tips of your wet hair of foam. Revive that miracle of the white tide it was your body spilling light. Throbs in the remember yet, you were, you were… And I know never I can´t see you again...»

(fragment L.E.Aute)

Back To My Artist Studio

And the routine is installed again in the life of the artist, stroller from the central studio to entertainment centers where to share with friends or presence in the cultural activity of your city or where you are required to help the most varied causes . Every day and every week he immerses himself in the interior of the canvas and, stuck to the easel, he dedicates himself to creating an iconography that identifies him with his legend as a consecrated painter. At the same time, the commissions of “bolumarian” portraits help him to mix reality with his metaphorical universe, exchanged with the sender and the receiver in the intrigure of the work.

The background music accompanies him along with the visits of friends in need of a chat time or the people leaning on the threshold of the workshop to see their creativity while painting and gently retouching the chromatism impregnated on the canvas. His painting has always aroused the curiosity of the public, together with the different formats and collections he houses in his studio. Landscapes tinged with warm and cold colors, women devouring pictures of femininity, portraits of their effigies with remarkable detail, couples exchanging codes of conduct and virile or androgynous men who refuse to change. Along with this collage of styles, colors and formats, newly painted ceramics, engraved folders to collect different themes, silkscreens with a brushstroke or personal touch of the artist and sculptural bronzes to frame his present legacy. A whole universe housed in his studio while in the background sounds a song of farewell and welcome to a new era. Luis Bolumar Santamaria, a beloved artist with a perennial smile, receives the affectionate expressions of a devoted public that visits his last exhibition, toasting for life and singing to Edith Piaf. Always!

Nothing at all

No, nothing at all, I do not regret anything,

Neither the good that they have done to me, nor the bad, everything for me is the same.

No, nothing at all, I do not regret anything, It’s paid, swept, forgotten, it’s over.

With my memories, I light the fire

My memories, my pleasures, I do not need them.

Sweep my loves with their tremors, Sweeps every day, I start again from scratch.

No, nothing at all, I do not regret anything,

Neither the good that they have done to me, nor the bad, everything for me is the same.

No, nothing at all, I do not regret anything.

For my life, for my joys, today this begins with you!