When the Government gave its approval in November 2014 Jordi Teixidor He received the National Plastic Arts Award and achieved this In recognition of the “unique and challenging path” the Valencian painter followed in the art world art. It was a path “conscientiously and independently chosen”, the jury said.
This road has been around for over sixty years now, Teixidor, The undefeated champion of abstraction in the contemporary art scene in Spain, He continues to look forward but is also allowed to look back. First, with the exhibition “End of the Game”, held at IVAM in 2022, which brings together the works of the avant-garde groups Nueva Generación and Hasta del Arte, from their inception to the present day. And now through a documentary –retrospective– will be presented next January 26 at the Valencian museum, and of which Teixidor is the sole and complete hero.
“Actually,” he emphasizes before Lift-EMV– From the group Prensa Ibérica, there are no copies of any of my pictures in the documentary, and perhaps this is the most surprising thing. “This must be the only documentary in which we talk about a painter and his paintings, but his paintings are not included.”
Simple, white and unlimited
Although it could perfectly be a painting by Teixidor if the sole setting in which the action takes place (a stark, white room with well-defined boundaries) did not turn out to be one of Teixidor’s paintings, his paintings do not appear. Pictorial representations that the Valencian had been on the run since he studied at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts as a young man.
The filmmakers were just after the exhibition at IVAM. Miguel Álvarez Fernández, Bruno Dozza and Álvaro Oliveros del Castillo They offered to do with Teixidor the same thing they had done with the musician Luis de Pablo a few years earlier: sit him in front of a camera so he could talk not only about his work but also about the circumstances surrounding him. “Painters almost never talk about their paintings, but painting should also be talked about, so I said yes.”
So why talk about his career at this point in the journey? Does Teixidor need to explain a work? As he states in the documentary, he is not as popular as some of his contemporaries, perhaps because he “scares” the audience?
“No,” he replies, “quite the opposite. I have less need than before to explain my painting. What I paint is what I paint and it is what I am, for better or for worse. When you are young you see that this painting is an answer to your security issues and certainty about certain ideas.” “You find yourself needing to explain more. This film is not an act of arrogance, but an act of intellectual maturity, so that anyone who can and wants to understand my career can do so.”
A literary painter
Teixidor’s birthplace Valencia In 1941, he was the eighth child of a large family who lived in a house full of books.. So much so that ‘Retrospective’ begins with the painter realizing that his main influence has always been literature.
“Reading a lot formed the basis of my ideas about culture and creation; I get the feeling that you are doing something that can become a painting,” he tells this newspaper. However, Teixidor also admits that “the novels have been falling out of my hands lately.” “In recent years,” he adds, “it is poetry that has brought me to the knowledge of a medium other than painting.”
The readings enabled him to discover a Central European culture, which he soon adopted “as a rejection of my Mediterranean nature” and the “provincial and poor” painting culture they tried to instill in him. San Carlos School of Fine Arts and whom Sorolla personifies in his work.He goes so far as to say in the documentary that he has been “fighting” by joining intangible forces almost from the beginning of his career. “The closest I came to Sorolla was the distance between my house and Malvarosa,” says Teixidor.
Now before Levante-EMV he says: “Sorolla seems to me an extraordinary painter, but I am not at all interested in how the picture, reality, objects, figures are presented. Of course, painting them paints them as if they did not exist.” other.”
In the ‘Retrospective’ he says that Teixidor was abstract when it was “unnatural” for him to be like that in Valencia, and also comments to this newspaper when he was not welcomed by the dictatorship and its opposition. “Abstraction was my way of adapting to modernity in a country where the concept was despised by radicals on both the left and the right.”
The sacred versus the humorous
There’s politics in ‘Retrospective’ (“I’ve lost a little bit of interest,” he admits, “or it just doesn’t affect me as much anymore”), and there’s also religion. More precisely, according to Teixidor, there is a sacredness lost in the art world for the sake of “becoming”.
He explains to Levante-EMV: “From the handprints in Altamira until today, art has always been associated with the sacred. But now we have replaced the sacred with concepts that are sometimes closer to spectacle than art. “Art has the same value and functionality as before. “To the extent that the sacred is replaced by spectacle and events in society, I say no.”
WITH TeixidorIn any case, he remains concerned that his paintings continue to convey this sacredness. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find it in galleries and museums. “Moreover,” he adds, “the point of my paintings is that this concept of the sacred can emerge in painting. I take it to levels of thought and even seriousness that some people or types of society may not be interested in. They are right. My work, if it does not frighten, is something that moves us in terms of not revealing beauty, becoming, and spectacle.” “It moves away from the norm. My work is made through subtraction and subtraction.”
In fact, ‘Retrospective’ ends with Teixidor sitting in a white background and recalling an interview in which Curro Romero said he wanted to continue to do the bullfighting at an increasingly slower pace. “I also want to paint slower, more deeply.”