Temporary exhibition

Pedro González, from Icerses to Cosmoarte

After his return to Tenerife from Venezuela in 1961, Pedro González (La Laguna, 1927 – 2016) undertook a profound theoretical and plastic study in his work, partly already anticipated in the canvases and drawings he made in the late 50s. Space, line and form were imposed as vertebral elements in his new language. In the early sixties, his research gave rise to the poetics of the Icerse, disturbing volumes whose name refers to an area of Candelaria where the painter had acquired a farm, but which in essence dive in abstraction, in the mass freed from any reference that occupies the complex space of the canvas. Then, from the middle of that decade, those gray spots of the Icerses, paintings «on the edge of silence» (as José Hierro described them in 1968, at a time when González’s work found a significant reception in Madrid’s galleries), were suddenly transformed by the incorporation of thick expressionist strokes, drawing the elemental lines of the strange bodies that inhabit his Cosmoartes; This pictorial inquiry will last for more than twenty years and, without forgetting the concern for space, he will incorporate new compositional solutions, colour and use of glazes, as well as his interest in the Baroque and, in general, in the History of Art.

Thirty years after his first Icerses, Pedro returned to them around 1992, developing a series of icerses-construction, and would later reinterpret them again, although in reality, this floating stain, semi-translucent, is a new and very interesting work of art, which marks the beginning of an important period of cultural renovation on the island as well as one of the most influential trajectories of the 20th century in the Canary Island. The art remained throughout his work as a basic element, a matrix form from which to reconstruct still life, seas or bodies, and to sustain the particular language of his paintings.

Eliseo G Izquierdo