BIOGRAFÍAEXPOSICIONESGERENCIACONTACTOTESTIMONIOSACTIVIDADES ÓLEOGRABADODIBUJOOTROS

Biografía   5/5   May 1995, at his studio in Madrid, a few months before his death   And so, in the mid-seventies, there began the twenty-year period of Eufemiano’s maximum artistic maturity. He explored in depth the field of engraving, which he studied with the utmost seriousness, and produced a brief but significant series of hard-ground and soft-ground (varnish) etchings. In spite of the great interest that the medium aroused in him, in the end he felt the same about it as he had felt earlier about drawing, or about landscape painting (reduced, at that point in his career, to mere summer “finger exercises”): anything that was not easel painting became for him an unbearable burden on his painting hours, which he knew to be limited. His vital time called for concentration, since he was well aware of what he wanted. And Eufemiano, who had been a full-time professional painter during his entire adult life, devoted himself to painting with renewed intensity. What had earlier been isolated, exceptional challenges, such as dramatic figures, with a rich, almost oneiric symbolism – mannequins of different kinds, suits of armour – became the “normality” in his production. On the semantic aspect, it is worth pointing out the sustained presence of symbols of punishment and constriction – barbed wire, bonds, exposed and vulnerable nudity, masks, mutilation –, almost as a paradoxical, triumphant statement that his was a painful road towards freedom. On the frontier between the semantic and the compositional, his austere framings began systematically to explore powerful, decided cuts which shape the picture plane as a window struggling to hardly contain an iconic force which overflows it. In some of his works the “cut” moves from the edges towards the interior of the field, by integrating into the composition “the unfinished”, the scarcely shaded, or even “the untreated”, the physical bareness of the base. On the technical dimension, Eufemiano made even further progress in his investigation into technique, with a capture of light and volume probably without precedent in the history of Western painting – as a paradigmatic demonstration of this achievement, see his unique “series on a suit of armour” which materialized the pre-adolescent artist’s plan “to be a sculptor” better than any “real” sculpture would have done. In any event, the emphasis on composition was always the vertex of his project and, combined with the technical demands he was imposing upon himself, was extending production times to truly “sculptural” levels – frequently, each oil painting would take many months to complete. Almost without exception, every painting posed an important challenge, and Eufemiano would gradually surmount them. Progressively his works carried to an extreme his marked preoccupation with abstract composition: over and above their exceptional semantic fidelity to a reality which does not exist, they are immediately legible as blocks of colour, lights, shadows, lines, volumes, negative spaces … Every work stands out as a precisely, rigorously cohesive complex in which each individual part plays an essential role in the balance and value of the whole. His is a refined composition which succeeds in making all painting dimensions relative; his growing mastery enabled him to aspire to the extreme, but he also knew how to stop before reaching it. His compositional actions were “almost” absolute and in being “almost” so they summarize their ability to break categories, to captivate and destabilize the viewer. His works constitute not only a “lesson in painting” but also and much more importantly – since viewers are far more numerous – a “lesson in viewing”, the benefits of which can be reaped by those who, having seriously confronted his paintings, contemplate again the world around them. Eufemiano produced these difficult canvasses – difficult in every sense of the word – as part of a personal project which was not even remotely public or commercial; he longed neither for honours nor for wealth. His professional introspection was ever increasing, partly as a consequence of the release from responsibilities resulting from the evolution of his family (his widowerhood, his children’s emancipation), partly because of his inner transformation and his scepticism towards the prevailing cultural forms, and partly owing to the constraints of his nearly impossible mode of production. He gave up taking part in exhibitions, he reduced his contacts with artistic circles, and he painted above all to create a body of painting which could speak to a world which was about to come. He did, however, keep regularly in touch as a teacher with a group of non professional painters whom he continued to guide. In the spring of 1995 a serious accident in which he lost sight in one eye suddenly forced him to give up painting for ever. Six months later he passed away quietly, without fuss. His personal amalgam of projects of unattainable culmination, non sculpted sculpture, human portraits through interposed objects, public and private independence, exile without return to his native Marchena, self-contradicting combination of opposites (the object against the character, the inner versus the outside world), the emptying of seemingly elevated semantics, unquestionably contemporary abstraction, exaltation of the grammatical instruments of the historic tradition, and extreme opposites in extreme balance had been achieved, materialized in a series of paintings, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say, in a bold and provocative sequence of painted thoughts. They remain there, and tell immeasurably more than any biographical sketch     Versión española   5/5

Gerencia del Legado Artístico Bendición de Campos 10, 28036 Madrid, España T: +34 609 30 32 38 · info@eufemiano.org