Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE).- Velázquez, Vermeer, El Greco, Van Gogh and Picasso were some of the masters who reproduced in their paintings other people’s paintings or drawings that, by way of only apparently explicit messages, raise questions that can still be remain unanswered, as revealed by Oscar Martínez in “El eco pintando” (Siruela).
This analysis of 23 masterpieces of painting from all times is not an academic essay but a hybrid book, an experiential essay that mixes narratives with personal reflections, a display of erudition and an example of sensitivity with which its author, according to Said in an interview with EFE, he hopes that “the reader will not see these paintings in the same way again.”
“Art is not only food for the soul, but also challenges us with questions that, even raised several centuries ago, are still valid today; a classic work is the one that lasts because it continues to be able to tell something to whoever stands in front of it”, points out Oscar Martínez, also author of “Umbrales”, another erudite book on architecture and monuments that has ended up becoming an involuntary guide to art-loving readers.
“I’m interested in works that open doors and ask questions even if they don’t answer all those questions; works that posed a mystery in their time and that are capable of intertwining with issues that continue to affect us all today”, the author has said to give two paradigmatic examples, “Las Meninas” by Velázquez, and “El Guernica” by Picasso.
“Las Meninas” are without being
Curiously, neither of these two paintings is among the 23 selected by Martínez, for various reasons. “I never intended to do ‘top forty,’ but rather tried to be original and not devote a chapter to the work that any reader would expect to find in a book like this. And, on the other hand, ‘Las Meninas’ are still present, they are quoted every twenty or thirty pages and fly over the entire book”.
Yes, it is included in these pages -and serves as an Epilogue- another paradigmatic work, “The Arnolfini Marriage”, by Jan van Eyck, a painting considered a jewel by the Kings of Spain, who always had it close until it disappeared in the War of the independence. It is later rescued in London, and a painting that was seen and admired by all the painters of the Court, from Velázquez to Goya, and whose mirror is an antecedent of “Las Meninas”.
The matter of the mirrors inside the paintings, also as a system to “get the viewer inside” the work, “would make for a separate book”, but Martínez insists that, although with different levels of reading depending on the intellectual baggage of each reader, he wanted to make a book accessible to anyone interested in painting, and for this reason he has divided it into four blocks.
Posters, maps, tapestries, mirrors…
Those four headings are “Prints, posters, maps and photographs”, “Fabrics and textiles”, “Pictures within paintings, within…” and “Mirrors, their reflections and their spells”.
The least interesting of these sections, perhaps that of textiles, is so exciting that it includes an analysis of El Greco’s “The Burial of the Lord of Orgaz” -one of those works, the author points out, that become more important than the place that hosts them-, the use of the American flag by the abstract expressionist Jasper Johns, the reproductions of the Holy Face and the relationship of “Las Hilanderas” by Velázquez with the mythological fable of Arachne -a relationship not detected by scholars until the middle of the 20th century.
“Only ‘Las Hilanderas’ would be enough for several doctoral theses, for centuries it was considered a more or less costumbrista genre scene, but its understanding goes through the image of the tapestry in the background, a clear example of meta-painting that combines the concepts of matter and object, among other suggestive subjects, in addition to the figure of Arachne; it is a very mysterious painting, also overshadowed by the brilliance of ‘Las Meninas’”.
The phrase of the singer-songwriter Quique González “The mystery lasts longer than the certainty” has been kept very much in mind by Martínez in the research and writing of “El eco pintado” but “without falling into the mysterious, but focusing on the shadow areas, those places in those where not everything is told, there is a lot of information in the margins and in the background of the paintings, often that is where the detail is”, concludes Oscar Martínez. EFE