He is not born every year, or even every ten years, or every ten years, until Sempere is a transcendent artistic personality. Celebrating the existence of this artist every year, establishing as a party and planning actions around his figure must be mandatory for the whole world to recognize him. Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Eusebio Sempere in Onil: an event that must be highlighted and commemorated. And we are ready for it.
That is why the Generalitat Valenciana, through the Consell General Assembly, declared 2023 as the Year of Eusebio Sempere, at a meeting held on January 27 at the artist’s reference place, the Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art MACA. centennial of his birth. And to channel this anniversary’s event, he established a Commemoration Commission: an open program that allows anyone enthusiastic about the artist’s work to celebrate together: public and private institutions, museums and cultural centres, universities, foundations, galleries, artists, researchers, teachers or schoolchildren, musicians, poets or dancers… the presence of Eusebio Sempere, with a commitment to develop and expand the knowledge of his figure and his contribution to art history and Spanish culture.
The programming of this Sempere Year 2023 should respond to all interests, appeal to different audiences, different levels of knowledge, and have the most diverse distribution platforms. Proposals should have a common theme, some kind of scenario, which forms axes of knowledge, research and dissemination about Sempere’s work and personality. What they reported, even popularized. We also believe that actions, activities and projects should go beyond these centennial celebrations. Movements that persist over time and form the basis of all future research. Significant long-distance projects include the desire to have the city’s train station named Alicante-Eusebio Sempere.
Artist
Eusebio Sempere is one of the most important Spanish artists of the second half of the 20th century and is undoubtedly Alicante’s most internationally recognized artist. His work always revolves around geometric abstraction, sometimes approaching optics and kinetics, sometimes more of a landscape aspect. The result of meticulous and sustained study of geometric shape, optical illusion and sense of movement, his works have a very unique lyricism and great formal beauty.
Sempere was born in 1923 in Onil, a small industrial city in the province of Alicante, into a humble artisanal family. He studied at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia, where the teachings of modern art ended with Sorolla, the only model followed. Nevertheless, Sempere received a solid trade education, which is evident in the elegant technique he displayed both in his works of that time and in all his later works.
In 1948 he went to Paris on a scholarship, and settled there for twelve years, away from the stifling climate of Franco’s Spain. He lived with Spanish artists such as Eduardo Chillida, Salvador Victoria, Pablo Palazuelo and Lucio Muñoz, with whom he formed intense friendships. There he met avant-garde survivors like Georges Braque or Jean Arp, whom he had always admired; Despite being related to the artists of the optical-kinetic movement Sempere was with in those early years, he was trained in the basics of modern art through the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian or Paul Klee, who strongly influenced the young artist. associated: identified: Victor Vasarely, Jesús Soto, Nicolas Schöffer, Julio Le Parc or Francisco Sobrino. And in Paris, Sempere decides to abandon figuration and dive into geometric abstraction in two series, “gouache on cardboard” and “bright”, which make up his alphabet with simple shapes that become more complex in terms of movement and volume. Reliefs” are wooden artifacts with different planes, illuminated by alternating light bulbs thanks to a small electric motor.
In 1960 Sempere returned to Madrid and settled in with Abel Martín (1931-1993), a life and work colleague with whom he would remain for the rest of his life. In Spain he found an artistic medium dominated by more gestural and material informality and realism. His early works here were gouaches on wood, geometry drawn with a sketch pen on a gestural, thick and matte background, in which Sempere proposes a lyrical picture of atmospheric memories stretching across the Castilian landscape. He joined the Cuenca group led by Fernando Zóbel and was actively involved in the creation of the Spanish Museum of Abstract Art. Since learning the screen printing technique that Sempere and Martín introduced in Spain in Paris, he has been promoting the printing of graphic works carried out in the Museum, making fine prints of himself and his fellow artists, thus contributing to its dissemination. art.abstract hitherto unknown.
Sempere has participated in important biennials, numerous group and solo exhibitions in Spain and abroad. She received a scholarship to stay in the United States and has exhibited at MOMA (she received a piece from herself) and the Bertha Schaefer gallery in New York. He achieved success and recognition in his exhibitions at the Juana Mordó gallery in Madrid, and from the late 60s Sempere began a much more experimental period. He became interested in engineering and industrial design and related arts and sciences by attending the electroacoustic music laboratory of the Alea group or the Seminar on the Analysis and Generation of Automated Forms at the Center for Computing at the University of Madrid. with computers.
Full years of hard work by Sempere. In his paintings, very fine lines tore the wood and made only slight grooves that are sensitive to the touch; the texture disappeared, the landscape barely existed, the color spectrum exploded, increasingly abstract but widened by the search for boundaries. He also conducts sculpture experiments, although he never saw himself as a real sculptor, his three-dimensional works are very important. Sculptures with painted iron bars, statues bases, or hanging chrome steel have one thing in common: they all move. Consisting of a series of rods attached to a base or an axis, they create volume through the observer’s observation, and gravity gravity in space by reflecting the light they receive from their surroundings.
In 1977, in the midst of a creative whirlwind, Sempere performed an exercise of generosity and asceticism driven by its radical nature: he donated his collection of artworks to the city of Alicante for the creation of the Museo de. la Asegurada. Pieces that he managed to collect in a few years of success and economic comfort that he enjoyed. An immeasurable, bold and determined initiative that can change the cultural history of a city. Consisting of 177 works, this 20th Century Art Collection brings together a long list of the great artists of the 20th century and is the reason why the Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art exists.
From 1981 until his death in 1985, Sempere developed a degenerative disease that gradually prevented him from painting and conditions a plastic career from then on through more spiritual realms: serenity, serenity, the sensuality of a scriptural gaze. , inspiration. He also writes mystical and imaginary poems, which are present in the compositions that dominate his paintings and which he will gradually transfer to his serigraphs, in which he examines insecurities and a certain spiritual explosion. Since the late ’70s, his paintings are baroque, very complex in composition, with rich color ranges and subtle transparent effects, always in search of light in its extreme intensities, half-lights and halftones … undoubtedly some of his finest works.
Quiet Revolutionary
Sempere is one of the artists who fooled us. We always imagine him leaning on a work desk next to his painting tools: pencils, rulers, squares and compasses, small brushes and multicolored gouache containers for perfect geometry. But Sempere is a quiet revolutionary and spends his time in the forefront of the most advanced projects, the most experimental meetings… as one of the pioneers of the contemporary… the intellectuals of the moment: architects, musicians, engineers, philosophers, writers, scientists… A large group of friends who believe deeply in the integrative power of art and become involved in their own aesthetic adventures that promote the harmony of art. That’s why he relates to the world of poetry and experimental literature, architecture and engineering, and music. It always contributes to modernity in a backward country and is reluctant to change.
Also convinced of the necessary, democratic and necessary artistic culture for all, he is involved in the finest adventures of Spanish art: the creation of the Spanish Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca, computer art at the Center for Computation of the University of Madrid, the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid. The design of the Open Air Sculpture Museum or the design of his own La Asegurada Museum, thanks to his collection of artworks for the city of Alicante.
Celebrating this centennial is to focus on Eusebio Sempere in reckoning with art history, which prioritizes some artistic discourses over others and forgets innovative creators like the artist from Alicante, who carried out a stubborn work of poetic resistance. . It is inappropriate to continue to argue that only Sempere bent over the table and drew lines in almost miniaturistic ways. Not only because of these projects he was involved in, to which we can add chronicles from Paris, but also the State’s attempts to acquire the works of Vasarely or Arp, an exhibition project on Kandinsky or Julio González, theater sets, for the Oti festival, for the Trazos TV program … many large-scale for work and most urban spaces: design of railings, benches and utility poles in Paseo de la Castellana, public sculptures in Madrid, Tenerife, Valencia, Elche, Onil, Alcoi or Alicante, mural by Fuengirola… but Sempere He knows it’s one of the most important democratic conquests because of the same concept of the public sphere that . Few know this information, but Eusebio Sempere (along with Pablo Serrano and Arcadio Blasco as artists) was part of the first commission to implement the cultural one percent in 1979; promotion of conservation, heritage or artistic production.
Sempere extra-artistic inexhaustible. We didn’t mention Toma de la Magdalena, the Tenerife Sculpture Meetings, sculpture for IBM, jewelry design, car paint design, fans or botijos…, her position as a Board Member. The board of trustees of the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, the conferences, roundtables or events he attended as a speaker, neither his cameo as an actor in a film by Basilio Martín Patiño, nor his time spent as a professor at the School of Fine Arts, Artes de San in Madrid Fernando, neither his arrest for participating in Homage to Picasso… nor many other episodes. endless Semper Take a look at the artistic legacy left to us in all its dimensions. Revisit the figure of Eusebio Sempere from other arts, as he advocates, as a fundamental reference and with an open reading that brings the next generation closer where it deserves to be. Delicate and tense, Eusebio is generous, as Chillida says.