Matias quetglas
By Baltasar Porcel.
Matías Quetglas comes from an island of earthen stone, of mud: Menorca. But he probably paints the way he does because he also spent time, captivated, in Italy: the frescoes, their warm, opaque, tactile tones, like the earth itself. So, if Menorca is to have an artistic tradition other than that of prehistoric stone symbols, what else could it be but Roman art in its broadest sense, from the paintings of Pompeii and Etruscan figures to De Chirico or Morandi? Rome, the Mediterranean, Greece from the 8th to the 4th centuries BCE.
And with this, I don’t mean to say that Quetglas isn’t influenced by Spanish realism, both past and present, one of the great universal and timeless schools of painting, which can be traced back to the 16th century and extend to Romero de Torres, Vázquez Díaz, or Antonio López, to name just three very different artists. Quetglas certainly belongs within this tradition. But it is even more certain that two fundamental traits set him apart: the earthy quality of his painting in terms of treatment and color, uncommon in the Iberian Peninsula’s tradition, and the absence of transcendental gravity, of the congenital sadness that saturates the art of the Hispanic kingdoms.
In Matías Quetglas, ritual, life, and matter form an indivisible whole. Like Picasso himself, who, being an endearingly Spanish artist, possesses a vitality, a joy, unusual not only in art but also in Peninsular culture. And with the Italianate Picasso of the 1920s, Quetglas shares points of contact, although their genius differs: Picasso’s is mobile, Quetglas’s static. In Picasso, everything flees, and in Quetglas, everything remains. The very light that so preoccupies Quetglas is, in him, more a state of mind or a Mannerist impact than a magmatic gradation of Impressionist character.
In Matías Quetglas’s paintings, everything is almost always seen in relation to myth: man is an echo or a voice, a kind of representation of something else, of a third dimension, as Ernst Jünger would say. They can be Baroque gestures, emphasized, marbled, scenes from a theatrical piece taking place elsewhere, from which an eternalized echo persists. The creatures that embody him sometimes lack even facial features; they are merely an expression, all rendered in a dense, subtle, and muted chromatism, highly complex tones in their creation that, once finished, transform into resounding presences.
Quetglas is a painter of extraordinary solidity, with a firm personality. I not only like to look at his paintings, but also to touch them: to run my fingers gently over them, to receive their message of the strongest, most profound modernity: the kind that Vasari, also evidently using the word modernity, attributed to Michelangelo.
Guadalimar Magazine, 1994.
