Biombo acuario-tetera (Aquarium-Teapot, Screen)

Rafael Pérez-Mínguez and Guillermo Pérez Villalta (together with Carlos Franco and Carlos Alcolea) formed the so-called “hard core” of Madrid’s Nueva Figuración (New Figuration) group in the early 1970s. Their collaboration on this piece served as an inaugural manifesto for that artistic movement while standing as a testament to the two painters’ friendship. As a three-dimensional pictorial object, the screen brings together several characteristic features of emerging postmodern sensibility: stylistic hybridisation, ironic reappropriation of historical references, narrative fragmentation and visual theatricality. All these strategies become ways of vindicating painting as a valid medium in the face of the discredit inherited from conceptualism. The images on the screen evoke both the domestic and the surreal, with references to artists such as René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, certain heterodox pop artists like David Hockney and Ronald B. Kitaj, and Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice in Wonderland, a recurring source in the works of other creators of his generation, such as Carlos Alcolea.

Raúl Martínez Arranz