Matisse de día, Matisse de noche (Matisse by Day, Matisse by Night)

‘If painting is dead, we are necrophiliacs, Titi.’ This is how Carlos Alcolea expressed this generation’s passion for painting to Juan Antonio Aguirre. Considered one of the most important theoretical artists of his generation, Alcolea adopted the most intellectualised stance of the Nueva Figuración
Madrileña (New Madrid Figuration) group. In his book Aprender a nadar (Learning to Swim, 1980), he summarises his complex aesthetic theory on painting, which he visualises as a grammar of forms, meanings and colours, interspersed with references to music, literature and philosophy and a
symbolic universe that he articulates around his favourite authors, such as Mozart, Proust, Hockney and Deleuze. The piece Matisse de día, Matisse de noche (Matisse by Day, Matisse by Night) — included in the founding show Otras figuraciones (Other Figurations) — pays tribute to one of the leading painters that his movement admired, the hedonist par excellence of the French avant-garde, Henri Matisse. The composition is structured around the Moebius strip, the quintessential figure of continuity that the artist uses to draw the eye in an endless loop between flat colours and humanoid forms on the verges between reality and fantasy, a structure that commemorates the eternity of painting.

María Teresa López Flores