Pascual de Cabo’s landscape painting dates from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s. For more than forty years he has worked on landscapes, mainly Majorcan, with some foray into the landscape of Andalusia, a land that has always attracted him, and it was precisely in Seville where he took up residence a few years ago.

His unusual confidence and tenacity make him a skilful author, with a surprising agility to finish a piece. As he develops realistic, naturalistic and idealistic techniques, a spontaneous rain comes out of his brushes, expressing and spreading his emotivity through the colours. In this pictorial genre focused on the landscape of Majorca, he has depicted several scenes of the Mediterranean and the Serra de Tramuntana, and his compositions reveal a poetic atmosphere that abounds in his career. His affinity with Majorcan landscapes makes the viewer perceive the generous spontaneity his canvases are painted with.

The way he depicts his vision of the landscapes goes beyond the intervention on a canvas. He enters into the fragment he is going to describe as if it was an additional element. He penetrates into the etymology of roots, branches, stems, water lilies, and petals, rising to cosmology from within, and expanding towards the mountains and the panoramic views over the buildings of the cities.

Pascual says that artists must be clever, and also touched by a magic wand that imbues them with madness. Once he confessed to me that when he paints he feels “like a lynx, free in the midst of nature, alone, and eager to paint, and if another lifetime comes, I will do the same thing: painting over and over again”. 

He started with figurative painting, went through expressionism, impressionism, sometimes giving off the aromas of Fauvism, and then moved on to abstraction. Watercolour, oil, acrylic, pencil drawing, pastel, ink, graphic work; he mastered all these different methods, and in each and every one of them, his skill is perfectly attuned.

Born in Alicante in 1952, he won several drawing prizes at school when he was still very young. At the age of 14, his mother put him to work as a mechanic, and when he finished his working hours, he devoted himself to drawing. Then he realised that people were interested in his pieces, and they even bought them. 

As a teenager he began to travel; he lived in Paris, New York, Munich, El Salvador and South America, travelling from one end to the other. He admits that he is captivated by cities like Rome and Venice, and his visit to Japan was amazing. He recalls his youthful days in the neighbourhood Sa Calatrava, in Palma, with Xam, Horacio Sapere, his lifelong friend Luis Maraver, Pedro Daudero, Tarrassó, Xim Torrents, Antonia Dolç…

Among his prizes and awards, he always mentions his gratitude for receiving the Medalla d’Or Award from the city council of Palma in 2015. He loves the paintings of the American artist Edward Hopper. His work has been exhibited throughout the five continents, in galleries, museums, institutional spaces, and collectors from all over the world own some of his works.

He currently lives in Puebla del Río, Seville, although he keeps visiting Majorca and occasionally travels to Tangiers, Morocco, for professional reasons. There is his studio-workshop, where he designs the promotion of his works in African and Asian countries.

Congratulations on this well-deserved «tribute» by Kairoi Art, Digital Museum of Painting of the Balearic Islands. To the everlasting figure of Pascual de Cabo.

Text; Xisco Barceló (journalist)