PICASSO THROUGH MY EYES

AN EXPERIMENTAL HABIT: THE PLAYROOM

Critical text: Patricia Bueno

We know from history that Pablo Picasso played at paraphrasing the great geniuses of from his own language to the great geniuses of art, and from his notebooks we know  that he invoked them to find his way when he was not inspired. Thus, there is an annotation from 1898 in one of them in which he wrote “Greco,

Velázquez, inspire me” in a burst of mystical petulance, very much in accordance with the complex personality that has transcended him.

But the underlying involved in the raison d’être of this solo show is much cleaner, naive and sweeter,  even though conceptually, it refers us to justify that genius, whatever age it may be, seeks the right path by revisiting milestones in the history of art. It is precisely along these lines that the young artist Rafael B., who at only 10 years of age, presents a series of medium and large format canvasses in which he his particular language, fragments of emblematic works such as Guernica and important works such as Guernica or the version of Las Meninas by the genius artist from Malaga.

And this exercise is very complex, it requires seriousness, commitment, courage and his own voice, which is perhaps where the greatest virtue of this exhibition, each one of this artist’s pieces brings risk, evolution and thought, beyond a skilful hand and  aesthetic conception, capable of transforming the mythical image of these iconographies from a child’s point of view, the prejudices of baggage linked to the plastic emblems, their contexts and their meanings and symbologies.

In descriptive terms, his work process can be seen as didactic, sublimated and transitional. Plastically, it is committedly playful,  transcendental and innovative, in harmony with the current pictorial international tendencies, in which the image is composed and created under the artist’s own criteria, starting from a reality that already exists, or that is created from his personal perception, in this case, executing

personal perception, perhaps without being consciously high metalanguage that is now of great interest.

However, and in spite of everything, it is his immense youth – with the innumerable opportunities that life has in store for this artist – that reaches the highest level of expectation, for if Picasso had the opportunity to study the work of Velázquez and El Greco at the age of seventeen and to maintain their reference in paintings and drawings throughout his career, and to take on and version their work with great mastery at the age of ten, it cannot be catalogued in any other way than as the marvellous prelude to a promising future.