Art criticism

VICENTE CASTELLANO BETWEEN THE CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

⌠ A PORTRAIT FROM/CIRCA THE FIFTY YEARS ⌡

The attraction of Paris. This is how we could describe one of the classic elements of the history of fragments and ruptures that Spanish art has gone through since the beginning of the 20th century, in its permanent aspiration to approach modernity. Or, what is the same, our substantiated modernity, -'trapped' it would be better to write-, between fragments and ruptures. A seduction, that of the French capital, which in our art would classically have Don Pablo's guardian beacon, omnipresent Picasso since his arrival in that city in the symbolic year 1900. Since stupefied, - Malaga and its old citadel would be left behind, also the stony Barcelona of "Els Quatre Gats" or the narrowness of the streets of Madrid-, and the artist contemplated the spectacle of cinema and light which, both, fairies bathing in torrents the Universal Exposition in Paris that year. Never ever, deep down, would he ever leave Paris.

In the post world war, from the end of the 1940s, many Spanish artists traveled to Paris. Something that was not as simple as it seems now, since simply obtaining a passport to travel to France was already an extremely complex matter. A good part of the creators traveled with official aid scholarships, in several cases promoted by the French Institutes -or Provincial Councils, as in the case of Castellano-, from various of our cities and forced to carry out studies or academic courses, lodging the majority in the College of Spain of the Cité Universitaire. The first to arrive after the war, according to the archives of this institution, would be August Puig (in 1947) and, after him, a year later, some others. Among the best known now, José Guerrero, Pablo Palazuelo or Eduardo Chillida. And, after just a few months, that of Onil and a student in Valencia, Eusebio Sempere. He will be the companion in fatigue of Castellano in the Paris of the fifties. Curiously, this list includes a good part of the names that will make the first abstract creations in Spain.

If surrealism, cubism or the Kleeian or Kandidiskyan heritage have been cited on many occasions, among the models looked at by the impoverished plastic Spain of the late forties, we will do so here too, it is not a trivial matter to review the flow that , from Paris, and by way of a creative return of the energies of the multiracial and versatile Parisian school, circulated towards modernity in Spain.

In 1952, the brother of Vicente Castellano, Carmelo (1925), arrived at the Colegio Español, at 9 Boulevard Jourdan. The school's concierges, Madame Cardoso and Madame d'Itry, would remember the stay once, in 1938 and 1939, of the brothers Manuel and José Gutiérrez Solana. Also by Pío Baroja, immersed in the writing of “El Hotel del Cisne”. From there he would also write the memories of him in "Aquí Paris", evoking those twilight days of the Spanish war, walks of the sadness of the shackled between the College and the perched nearby park of Montsouris. All green from where perhaps, behind the glass of his window, he could see Georges Braque –absorbed among the natures mortes.

We have already described, in some other text, what the situation was in Paris at the end of the 1940s. A place where, despite suffering from the humiliation and ravages of the world war, artists of various nationalities found a good reception, assumed almost as an ethical duty by the French authorities and intellectuals.

The creators of our country were able to travel to Paris, with more comfort than Puig, from February 1948, the date on which relations between Spain and France had been resumed after the Second World War. And the first Madrid-Paris trains then began to cross the borders, greeted with cheers and firecrackers by the exiles in Hendaye[. Until that date, crossing the borders was painful, travelers forced to travel from the Spanish customs to the gala by taxi and accompanied by the Civil Guard. This is how August Puig recalled it, evoking the crossing of Port-Bou, suitcase in hand and civil guards at his side, in his “Memories of a painter”.

However, in 1948 changes began to take place and the French Ministère de l'Education Nationale created the Comité d'Accueil aux etudiants etrangers, which would thus allow Hispanic creators contact with an extraordinarily noisy world, especially compared to the environment that they lived in Spain, and even more so in Valencia. The matter would be symbolized by citing some names: that of Bernard Dorival, for example, Curator of the Musée d'Art Moderne from occupied France who was, along with Jean Cassou or Jean Sarrailh, one of the most relevant personalities for the fair reception of the Spanish artists who arrived in Paris. Dorival's name binds, permanently to substantial facts of post-war Spanish painting, since the writing of the text of August Puig's first exhibition in Paris, 1949, at the Colegio de España.

In 1955 Vicente Castellano follows in the footsteps of some other artists who, like his brother, have moved to Paris. Gone are past trips to other important cities for art, such as Rome and Madrid, with the sole objective of getting to know his artistic environment. When he goes by train to France, in that wandering of a young painter eager to discover, he obviously does not know that his departure will not be, like that of so many, temporary and brief but will last more than two decades, until 1977.

The city of Paris, and the events that took place in it in those years, were evoked by the artists, mentioning paradise in some cases: “I woke up once, startled, dreaming that I was still in Spain, but no, I was in paradise ”, Puig would write. For Castellano, Paris was also “the great discovery”, as the artist whose footsteps follow so many creators of the earth will remember admiringly: Eusebio Sempere or Manuel Hernández Mompó. Also José Esteve Edo, Salvador Montesa or Salvador Victoria, among others. Barely a year after his arrival in the summer of 1955, we find the work of Vicente Castellano included in the collective exhibitions that are traditionally held in our Parisian College.

Curiously, his approach to Paris can be said to be 'classic', that is, very similar to that carried out by many Spanish painters. If later we will quote Rueda, with some like Pablo Palazuelo Castilian has extraordinary concomitance. This is what happens with the early departure to Paris, the city where they will remain, after both of them stay at the Colegio de España, for a long time. Not very far apart, by the way, in the physical space that they inhabited in the Parisian streets, one in rue Saint-Jacques and the Valencian one in rue Rollin. Also his encounter with the works of Klee and Kandinsky, his friendship with Nina Kandinsky, or his studies in engraving at the Parisian School of Fine Arts. Together with an extraordinary fondness for reflective painting or, also, for poetic timbres.

Sempere, Castellano's partner in the economic room of the College, has left testimonies, perhaps the most stark, that allow us to know what the Valencia that they will leave was like. And how that 'vulgar' environment would in turn become the impetus for the inevitable march: "in a city like Valencia, where the atmosphere was provincial and vulgar, training for a young painter could be disastrous".

In the fifties the Spanish artistic life began to be activated, despite the official stubbornness to continue the tiresome summa of National Exhibitions under all possible variants or denominations. Thus, in 1955, in Madrid and Valencia, among other Spanish cities, the exhibition “Recent Trends in French Painting (1945-1955)” was presented, curated by Jacques Lassaigne and which Vicente Castellano remembers having seen with admiration. It is undoubtedly one of the first exhibitions, which will be followed years later by others, such as those of Swiss, North American or Italian art, which shock new artists and alert them to the arrival of new times for the contemporary. . In the early 1955 exhibition there are works by Hartung, Manessier, Soulages, Viera da Silva or Jacques Villon, among twenty-five other artists who exhibit their creations alongside a tapestry by Matisse.

In Valencia, what we have sometimes called a 'prior act' to the foundation of "El Paso" will take place, we are referring to the exhibition that -organized among others by Millares, and with those who will be the most active members of his group-, It takes place in the Ateneo Mercantil in the spring of 1956, assuming, perhaps, the highest point, in the sense of being more visible, of the debate between figuration and abstraction.

Three years ago the Abstract Congress of Santander (1953), which we will refer to later, and two years ago the publication of the first book dedicated to abstraction in Spain: “Abstract art” by Antonio Aróstegui. The very title of the Valencian exhibition warned in its reiteration of the 'anomaly': “Spanish Abstract Art. I Salón Nacional de arte no figurativo”, thus showing the persistence of a discussion that had been at the heart of the theoretical concerns of the art world in the 1950s in Spain. And that it will become, almost, a useless discussion-consummation, since it will continue well into the sixties in Spain. And, meanwhile, as Manolo Millares predicted, “the world was moving forward”.

Castellano travels to Paris in 1955 and like many other artists, he comes and goes to Spain for family reasons on certain dates. The result of his stay and his knowledge of the new world of art seen in Paris, is the first individual exhibition, of 195 6, which is organized in your city by the Provincial Council of Valencia in the Palacio de la Generalidad. This is how Vicente Aguilera Cerni would see it when writing the brief presentation text for this exhibition, emphasizing, precisely in a priority place, the passage of Vicente Castellano through the French capital. Something also revealed in the titles of some of the fifty-four exhibited works, which recalled places in Spain, but also mentioned the memory of cities such as Padua, Verona, Rome or places like Gentilly or the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre.

The year that we have been referring to, that of his solo show in 1956, is known to have been a crucial year for artistic life in Valencia, if we think that the official date for the foundation of “Parpalló” was October 23 of that year, barely a month before the Castilian exhibition. It will thus coincide with the signatories of the founding letter, at one of the moments in which he comes into contact with Aguilera to write his text for the exhibition. Castellano was therefore, during his visit to the Ateneo, in the right place and at the right time.

In that text, Aguilera underlined certain characteristics of Castellano's career, then a youth, and that, practically, would accompany him until today. “He is fascinated by the elusive miracle of simplicity”, he would write upon discovering his work. He would also highlight his interest in research around the world of collage and, additionally, in reflection. All this under an apparent simplicity, immersed in inquiries about issues such as form, space or color, and that, as we will see later, would be frequented by certain members of 'Parpalló'. Castellano's painting, those final months of 1956 in which he painted "La Visitación", a painting in which figuration flees from the planes of representation, was about to make the final leap to the most stripped abstraction finding, after the cold appearance of the nomination of his abstract works of the immediate 1957, entitled "Structure", or his "Port Forms", some of the most notable examples.

“Structure” is a title, by the way, adopted on the same dates by another French-born man with a silent spirit, similar to Castellano's, and a visitor, in parallel worlds, to the same Paris: Gerardo Rueda. That between both artists there was mutual admiration is known. Seeing paintings by these creators, with the same title and the same symbolic date, "1957", in the midst of informalist fire, seems -seen from our time- more than an exercise of creative silences, the sign of the aplomb of the extraordinary belief in what they did, compared to to the noise of the proclamations, so just, of the informal.

Thus, the vindication that Castellano has made of the "structure" and the "form" has not been a moment that can be considered a passing moment in his career. Rather, it has been made almost in the manner of a guardianship proclamation, which historically seems to be made in the presence of Michavila and Aguilera Cerni. I also praise that, in its verb, it is substantiated in the undeniable ascription to “the formal”.

Thus, we also see the special fondness of this artist, also, for the concise proclamation, for the intelligence that refers to the silent voice. Silent voices that sometimes rise almost, as another circumstance of some artists of the generation of Castilian. We have already written in other places how it is not possible to place the context of what happened in the fifties if it is not underlined that, together with the emergence of informal abstraction with an expressionist tendency, closely linked to other similar processes that took place in Europe, North America and Japan , the presence of what in general and topical terms has been known as abstraction lyrique was produced. In any case, it remains to review what has been the history of Hispanic art where there is room for personalities outside the hegemonic tendency, artists of that other art, too, that we sometimes ascribe to the generation of silence. It is in this non-informal context, sometimes with a silent and constructed tendency, when it is possible to understand the presence of 'anomalous' collectives or artists, -in the sense of little clinging to what is considered, generally from the outside , the Hispanic 'tradition'-, as would be the case of Castilian.

This aforementioned element of conciseness has traveled secularly in the verb, but also in the artistic work of our artist, especially since the rigorous work with color planes and perforated illusions carried out at the end of the fifties. Holes in many cases illusory, holes that go through without going through the pictorial surface, in search of measure, -which seems to occasionally mention the poetry of Jean Arp-, in his particular inquiry about the lost dimension, his personal infinite holes of mistery.

And it is that conciseness, it is known, has not been very frequented by Hispanic painting, being shocking to hear these affirmations. ones of that calm man who is Vicente Castellano. Recently, I heard another exhaustive assertion from him that settled a worn-out discussion between painters and critics about the importance of style and fashion, and that was already reaching a dead end. During a pause in that conversation in which he had remained completely silent, seemingly on the sidelines, he blurted out: “the main value of a painter -he said sentencingly- is integrity”. Again, happily, silence reigned.

Léon-Louis Sosset, a critic who would analyze Vicente Castellano's painting in 1958 in a solo exhibition of the artist at the Galerie Zodiaque in Brussels, a fine analyst of Paul Delvaux's worlds in suspension, knew how to see a “strange refinement of materials (… ) and the lively balance of colors and shapes”, relating his work to the legacy of Schwitters, an artist thus discovered by the young Castellano and whose influence could be found a few years later in his work.

One of the things that caught the attention of the Belgian critic was the contradiction between the refinement of the works and the artist's homeland which, in his opinion, turned the exhibition into an unexpected event: “on n'attendait pas autant d'un jeune espagnol formed dans des milieux où predomine le conformisme artistique”. Thus showing a certain ignorance of the agitated situation of Spanish art in 1958, Sosset also ignored, from the rapid analysis of his work in the placidity of Brussels, the previous three years of Castellano's presence in Paris. He had been immersed in this city for years, in an environment full of voracious artists, eager rather -like him- to find themselves face to face with the new artistic trends.

Longing for Paris… “the cradle of artistic Esperanto”, Francisco Nieva would write to Rueda, encouraging him to a trip made by him on almost the same dates and places, going through similar spaces and people, as the Valencian painter. A permanent meeting more 'in absentia' because his paths -but not his people- will intersect frequently. From the painting of plans, circa 1957, both of common stock. Certain names resonate, in this special camaraderie, generally of the Parisian school: Poliakoff, Arp, De Stäel, Magnelli… And from there to the circles of dense matter, in Rueda made in the mid-spatial sixties and in later Castilian . This collector, in the mid-sixties, of ligneous remains in boxes, remains turned into relics, as the Madrid-born painter would later do at the end of the seventies, in his series known by the humorous title of “The social elegance of wood”. Both are art theater scenarios: in Rueda more accentuated the theatricality, in Castellano recalling rather disturbing worlds of collection, of scattered and motley objects in the Nevelson style.

Castellano has been a painter who has had, among his most outstanding characteristics, the undeniable vocation for modernity. His early departure, rather fleeing, from Valencia would praise, in turn, one of the classic components of the art of our time: entropy. It would not be strange if Sosset knew how to see the extraordinary melancholy that his paintings distilled. The same “impression of mélancolie indéfinissable” that the critic of “Le Soir” would see before his paintings in the Mistral gallery.

Thus, some of his paintings, some time later, would be grouped by Castellano under the little doubtful name of "Exodus". He aporia that he mentions the access of Spanish artists to modernity but also of the man of the twentieth century. Evocative paintings from which he departs in spite of himself, substantiated, again, in circles. This time superimposed, instead of perforated, and made with dense pictorial matter and textile remains, mainly burlap, which seemed to mention a kind of inexorability of fate. Fate and blind circle showing the shadow of a hole, it seems abyssal and towards nothing, painted by Castellano, already abandoned the Cité, from the exodus of 13 rue Rollin. From the activity of his Parisian work, as an illustrator, together with Ricardo Zamorano, in the "Notebooks of the Congress for the Freedom of Culture".

Castellano has sometimes recounted that difficult condition of the exile's always open wound, of the 'stigma' that Zambrano would say. The elusive melancholy of the one who leaves his place, the indelible mark that he will carry in his life. Removed this creator from the Spanish artistic environment, he would be left in no man's land, precisely at a crucial moment. His work could not be seen in the usual biennials or competitions (Venice, São Paulo, Alexandria or Pittsburgh), nor in the international exhibitions that allowed many of our artists, especially those who remained active around Madrid, to be made visible by gallery owners or international connaisseurs in those years around the end of the fifties and the early sixties.

However, he still remains Spending much of his time in Paris, Castellano did join "Parpalló" from its creation, participating in four of the first five exhibitions of this artistic group and linking himself to its activities during the most fruitful period of the group, until 1959. Castellano had been a signatory, as we have already pointed out, of the first “Open Letter of the Parpalló Group”, published on 1/XII/1956 in “Las Provincias” and “Levante” and his name would already be found in the first sample of "Parpalló" at the Mercantile Athenaeum of Valencia.

When meeting with the signatories of the "Letter", it was clear that Castellano carried the knowledge of the discovery of the artistic Paris of the mid-fifties and by enrolling in 'Parpalló' it was his will, as Sempere would also later do, to transmit said knowledge and, also , the news of the Parisian atmosphere. Paris was a city that in contemporary times had very relevant galleries. Suffice it to mention the presence of such active galleries in those years as Jeanne Bucher, Iris Clert, Daniel Cordier, René Drouin, Denise René or Maeght, leading galleries at the time of Castellano's arrival and which he declares to have visited frequently.

The first facts always seem relevant to me. In light of these, it must be understood that, with the abundant information that he possessed, in the first issue of "Arte Vivo" Vicente Castellano wrote the article, significantly boxed, entitled "External Criticism" to which an epilogue is added, also very symbolic. , entitled "We want". This article was published in March 1957, without Aguilera being mentioned in it, and was illustrated with one of his “Estructuras”. Collage of various materials that included fragments of chair grids that, as we will see later, will make some local critic pale but will also cause admiration, for the courage, of Manolo Gil. In his cited article, Castellano bitterly reflects on the sluggishness of the Valencian art world, which confronts the incessant activity of Barcelona citing, not explicitly, the exhibition "Another art", a true contemporary event of that 1957 and that has been left for the ineffable history of those years. The proclamation distilled by “We want” has something of the gunpowder of similar manifestos of these years: the defense of abstract art and the questioning of the meager criticism that exists. In that first issue of “Arte Vivo” Castellano's position was unbeatable. Done almost 'hand in hand' with Manolo Gil, also a signatory with the heteronym "Xil", Castellano was the author of one of the texts and his work also illustrated it. It deserved mention in his news, and a critical reflection by Gil on his collages, just a few months before his death.

Having also signed Castellano, in 1956, the aforementioned "Open letter" of 'Parpalló', two elements had to be especially dear to him. One was the experience, deeply rooted in feeling, of "the transcendence of art as an enrichment of the emotional experience and a factor of fulfillment." Somehow it is understood that the reflection of some of "Parpalló" was closer to the postulates of Oteiza, for example, before the values ​​of artistic experimentation, or the defense of normativity made plastic space, advocated by other creators programmatic such as “Team 57”. Something similar can be said of the early encounter, and rapport, with Santiago Lagunas in Valencia, circa 1951.

Starting “Parpalló” from the recognition of the individualism of each one of the subscribers of the letter, this group also resulted, when among its intentions it cited the desire to “rekindle the dying Valencian artistic life”, thus ending “with that unfair 'conspiracy of silence '”.

And it is that the 'conspiracy' was substantiated in the exodus, according to what was written, also an exodus extended towards the skin of a bull and symbolized in the trip of the Valencian artists towards, mainly, Madrid and Barcelona. Hispanic critics also spoke of an exodus when they reflected on the Valencia collective, mentioning their “anxiety to escape or lose sight of what surrounds them”. In short, the repeated exodus becomes, in any case, more than a circumstance, an inherent fact for a good part of the Spanish artists of the fifties.

Let us think that, in addition to the march to Paris, -without forgetting South America for the Galician artists-, a diaspora no less crude than that of the march to the French capital was the artists' journey, in the manner of an almost 'radial transtier ', from the provinces to an emerging Madrid, a city where everything that had any importance in the culturally impoverished Spain also happened. Although it may seem incredible from today's time distance, activities such as the Salons de los Once, Hispano-American Biennials, the presence of some international exhibitions in the capital or the attempt to create a museum setting for n contemporary art, all of these were situations viewed with enviable eagerness by artists who lived outside of Madrid. Especially from the singular meetings, artists and critics, that took place in the Abstract Art Congress of Santander in 1953. Radio trips, some as symbolic as the one made from Las Palmas by Millares and Chirino, in September 1955. Or the one from Manuel Rivera, in 1954, from another grim city for art, Granada, are sufficiently representative of the matter.

It is known that Manolo Gil was one of the most emblematic participants of “Parpalló”. Spoiled by his young death, honored in verses around the silence of the studio, already abandoned, by Millares, his career embodies the agitation of the debate in art at the time, and which was none other, as we have been emphasizing, that of the validity of abstraction. Gil had intense contacts with Jorge Oteiza, which are referred to in "The shadow of Oteiza (in the Spanish art of the fifties)" which also included a shaky work, one of his precursors "Estructuras" (1957), from the blinking time of Vincent Castellan. Gil and Oteiza were editors of one of the first existing theories about space in contemporary Hispanic artistic culture, the so-called "Theory of trimural space (or) Analysis of the elements in the wall or plane", in which they analyzed various issues spatial and, also, the capacity of movement of the color on the plane. It is extraordinary, and shocking, to find Gil's “Regular Figures Primer”, a work in which he reflects on the decomposition of the circle, looking at one of the sculptures, “Weightless Space Par”, by Jorge Oteiza. All this together with the work-collage of Castellano, with overlapping planes, so close in dates and reflections.

And in silences that would arrive.

The quote from this triad, Gil-Oteiza-Castellano, is appropriate, especially to symbolize how, along with abstraction obviously of an informal nature, -“tachista” as it was said at the time-, the Hispanic artistic world contemplated another possibility: that of constructed art. A rational and balanced art, an art of measurement that reflected, without avoiding sensitivity, around spatial research as a way, also another, and not exclusive, of approaching modernity.

The long previous mention of Gil is also justified because he, a diarist and scriptural writer, a thoughtful man, well informed by his friendship with Aguilera Cerni, and who has read, before anyone else in Spain, the work of Michel Tapié, underlines with astonishment the work de Castellano when I find it in the first exhibition of “Parpalló”. Devoting a unique and revealing description of the extent to which Castellano's work deserved to be highlighted among those of fifteen other participants: “then comes the surprise”.

Castellano's works, however, were not always well received by critical reflections, even less so by local journalistic criticism. “Good painter”, it was not understood “how can any plastic beauty be achieved in one of the collages (...) a piece of mesh from a dilapidated and filthy rocking chair”. The same grid as in “Nature morte à la chaisse cannée”, is interpreted in oilcloth by Picasso in his well-known and very early Cubist collage from the spring of 1912, preserved in the Musée Picasso. It was thus logical that when he exhibited in 1957 at the Danus Gallery in Palma de Mallorca, Joaquín Verdaguer described his creations, emphasizing their marginal aspect and not without a hint of buzz, as “Robinsonian art”.

From the Valencian carrer de Colon, meeting point of the pioneering artistic group of “Los Siete” in which Castilian participated circa 1950-1954, to the immediate jump to the multicultural hustle and bustle of Saint-Germain-des-Près. During his stay in Paris, in a new praise of conciseness, Castellano has highlighted -among the things that caught his attention and above any other issue-, what he would define as the "continuum". That is, a generalizing term that avoided the difficult in extenso description of what the enormous possibilities existing in the city meant for an artist.

Something that was already revealed from the studies of Castilian at the School of Fine Arts, located in rue Bonaparte, in the heart of the Latin quartier and made with an expressionist painter Edouard Goerg. He had also been an extraordinary lithographer and celinesque artist of the horrors of war, ever since he served in the First. His pictorial themes revealed a fondness for intense worlds, revealed from a very Ensor-like gaze. He was the companion of Maurice Denis, whose life was very parallel to that of Marcel Gromaire, and he was fond of the poetic vision substantiated in a gloomy painting. The illustrations of him, of Baudelaire, Villiers de Isle-Adams and Poe, would have an epitome in those he made for "L' Apocalypse" (1945). Singular painter, sexagenarian already when he meets Valencia no, Goerg had to transmit to a Castilian who was barely thirty years old the vision, perhaps for the first time, of what the true soul of an artist meant and, perhaps, also, the importance of what the Valencian would later call “ genuine personal expression.

What was the Paris like that Castellano found on that first initiatory journey that he undertook on July 12, 1955? A dazzling city in terms of cultural expression and contemporary art in particular. Suffice it to recall three exhibitions from that same time, which would become capital for a young artist who arrived from a Valencia in which the tutelary echoes of Sorolla or Pinazo still resounded. That year, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris held the exhibition "Cinquante ans d'art aux Etats-Unis", with works from the MoMA collection; Denise René exhibits hers, already a classic in the history of contemporary art, organized by Pontus Hulten “Le Mouvement”; o The Musée des Arts Decoratifs takes place between June and October, the retrospective “Picasso, works from 1900 to 1955”, an exhibition sometimes referred to by Castellano recalling his fundamental “encounter” with “Guernica”.

Without citing numerous other events, some as symbolic as Castellano's visits to Miró's exhibitions, whom he also met by chance during his flâneur life in Paris, held at the Maeght gallery at thirteen rue de Téhéran. Other than the one held on the occasion of the second individual exhibition, 1958, in the same room, by another colleague from the College, Pablo Palazuelo, and which the Valencian remembers having visited. The artist from Madrid, a creator who has also reflected on the "structures" he described as "lineages of forms", that is, formal structures that follow one another and germinate through successive studies. They are the result of the investigation around the various transformations, always in search of the revelation of the sensible universe of forms. A creator also very fond of rigor and order, Palazuelo left the Colegio de España in 1954 and, thanks to his relationship with the Maeghts, is already lodged among the enigmas of the bookshops and bistros on rue Saint-Jacques. .

As will happen to Palazuelo, there are two issues that need mentioning, when referring to the Paris of those fifties, such as the exhibition and critical attention, from the art world in general, that was devoted to the figures of Paul Klee and Vasily Kandisky. That the work of Paul Klee deserved extraordinary critical attention, at the end of the world war, in Europe and the United States, is already known. Klee's presence was that of a strange figure, isolated from the noise of contemporary art that Picasso or Matisse had dominated in those forties. Away from Nazi Germany that beat him up and died alone in the southern calm of Locarno in 1940, in the heat of war, the return to normality of peace had made the degenerate Klee one of the priorities, almost ethical, in the recovery of the figures of contemporary art. This was the case in North America when in 1941 the MoMA published his monograph written by Alfred H. Barr, coinciding with the North American itinerancy of the “Paul Klee memorial exhibition”. Precisely in Paris, in the fall of 1948, the retrospective "Paul Klee (1879-1940)" was held, which, among other places, had taken place at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In the dates we analyzed, the worldwide interest in Klee's work was extraordinary. Thus, in 1949, an exhibition similar to the previous one, with the collaboration of the Societé Klee of Bern, the Fondation Paul Klee and Kahnweiler, augmented with some works from North American collections, took place at the MoMA in New York, traveling through various American museums. . Also that same year, one of the classic books on Klee had just come to light, the one written by Douglas Cooper, published in London in the collection “The Penguin Modern Painters”, directed by Kenneth Clark.

It was evident that the presence of the work of Paul Klee had seized many of our abstract artists. Many of our abstract artists have debated between the surrealist heritage and the work of Klee, some made both influences compatible at various periods of his career. In any case, the citation of those who have mentioned the Kleeian heritage would exceed the intentions of this text. Klee had died fifteen years before Castellano's arrival in Paris and his work was considered essential in that place.

About Kandinsky, the Valencian recalls the reading of "Of the spiritual in art" and the meeting, -mediated by Sempere, and with the company of Lucio Muñoz-, with Nina Kandinsky, the artist's widow who accompanies them to the Neuilly studio- sur-Seine, back in the mid fifties.

Vertigo of the days… of the academic Valencia of professor Salvador Tuset, in the ESchool of Fine Arts of San Carlos and forced to the exquisite reliable portrait of lights and shadows, of eyes and ears, to travel to Paris and contemplate the works, art and spirit, made by Kandinsky. All this happens quickly, in just a decade.

Castellano has always recognized that his particular tutelary 'shadow' was none other than that of Sempere, let us remember one of the earliest abstract artists of our post-war painting. He had opened, in 1949, what he defined as “the march of the most daring expeditions along new paths in art”. It will be Sempere, already settled in Paris some time ago -and where he has thoroughly known Kandinsky's work-, who truly becomes Castellano's guide through that city of wonders for artists. Sempere distanced himself from his frustrated relationship with the painter Loló Soldevilla, they share the melancholy of distance, and also a cheap room at the College, frequenting the main exhibitions of the moment. Thus, an axis of the new times is created. Axis of modernity that runs through the advice of the priest and professor at the San Carlos school, Alfons Roig, around the capital elements of modernity (Kandinsky is one of the main ones) that he transmits to Sempere who, to in turn, distributes them to Castellano. He has always recognized that his access to abstraction occurs precisely with the impulse of the artist from Onil. Also among the shared admiration is the work of another Spaniard in Paris, Juan Gris.

In my opinion, one of the capital examples that reflects his extraordinary absorption of modernity would be the lacerated poster made by Vicente Castellano a few months after his arrival, in March 1956, for the “Exposition des peintres residents au College”. Poster for the College, thus praising the poetry of the letter, created for a traditional event: the collective exhibition of the artists housed in the College of Spain and that the Valencian painter faced with the Rotella-style collagistic technique, that is with the décollage of fragments of the commercial signage of the Parisian metro.

In short, 1955, the official year of his arrival in Paris, is also the year in which one of the painters most admired by Castellano, Nicolas de Staël, left for Antibes. The latter creator who, together with Van Gogh and Mondrian, are part of an artistic triad that our artist considers fundamental in his formative years.

A few years before the trip to Paris, Castellano had passed through Madrid, residing for a few seasons, in 1951 and 1952, on Calle de la Luna and frequenting the nearby studio of another Valencian painter from the early days of “Parpalló”, Agustín Albalat. There he remembers the days with El Greco at the Prado Museum, but also the walk through some classic galleries of the time, especially the "Artistas de Hoy" gallery, above the Fernando Fe bookstore, in Puerta del Sol or the bookstore- Buchholz Gallery on Paseo de Recoletos. In this last one, January 26, 1954, our painter remembers his astonishment at the first fully abstract exhibition of another artist, another one, who will soon follow the route of Paris, Luis Feito.

In 1957 Castellano will exhibit in Madrid, individually, in a gallery that received Rafael Canogar's work early (1954), the Altamira Gallery, on Prado Street, opposite the Ateneo directed by Joaquín de Lafuente. Juan Portolés will cite, in the text that accompanies the exhibition program and paraphrasing the recently deceased Manolo Gil, the “ethics of aesthetics”, as a guide -we now know it is maintained to this day- of this painter. The chronicle of the magazine “Goya” to that exhibition, signed by an incomprehensible J. Tudela, insisted on his relationship with “the forms promulgated by the latest promotions of Paris, in whose capital he resides”.

After twenty years of stay in the French capital, in 1977 the time in Paris ends for Castellano. Analyzed from now those times, it is observed that our painter has been a courageous and silent artist. That he made several fundamental decisions, in the radical sense, in his life as a painter: to ally himself with modernity from his native Valencia, back in the fifties, to create his first abstract works circa 1956-1957 and to leave, there was no more remedy, to Paris.

When the moment of return arrived, and a year before he left Rue Rollin, one of the first exhibitions that tried to recover the justice of the vision of our fractured and fragmented history of contemporary art took place at the Crowd Gallery in Madrid, under the title: “Chronicle of post-war Spanish painting. 1940-1960”. We could say that, in addition to proposing some obvious presences, the exhibition -within a very 'Transition' spirit - proposes the 'rehabilitation' of certain names that, for various reasons, had remained in oblivion. Vicente Castellano is one of the artists present.

In In mythology, Saturn, the well-known devourer of the stem, is sometimes represented with an hourglass, thus symbolizing the inflexible running of time. “Saturno” was the title of the painting by Castellano exhibited in “Multitud” and which formally also proposed a reflection on the vacancy of space that, as we know, always obsessed him. Reflecting on space and its occupation is, after all, also mentioning time. For Castellano, his reunion in “Multitud” began to heal a painful time of forgetfulness. And now, 2010, with this retrospective exhibition, finally closing, thirty years after that “Chronicle”, the conspiracy of silence.