Gayescas. History, Nature and Artifice

Abstract

Ramon Gaya did not felt comfortable with the painting of his time for this was prisoner of history and, more specifically, of history as the determiner of all human products and creations. Gaya refuses to put his paintings at the service of history because he suspects that the art that fits in molds fabricated by historiography falls into the category of artistic art; that´s to say that it is an unborn artifice and thus it belongs to culture and not to nature. These judgments on art and his rebellion against that exhausting way of being an artist based on the inauguration of a new historical stage every year, did cost him the title of “untimely”. But the truth is that Gaya has placed in front of us the mirror of the impotence to escape from this time we moderns feel sick and tired of. Gaya thus distinguishes between the time of painting and that of history. “The hour of painting”, the sunset, as Titian said, reveals other hierarchies that art history conceals and confuses. In rescuing the art from the context in which it was enclosed by history, Gaya shows us the life transmitted by painting, which despite not being current, is present and therefore presence. If we make the effort to regard Gaya´s pictures not as art history, we look at them with the innocence of those who takes them as a presence exempted from their topicality, and then we will discover that his paintings are alive. We can therefore say that Gaya’s painting fights against the au courrant. Ramon Gaya was never topical.