29.09.2011

Paulos Catalog Pinturas - Paintings
Texts by Pablo Cohen & Javier Vicedo Alós
Download PDF (english version at the end)

10 x 10 cm
24 pages
2010 / 11

A Nonnegotiable Passion

In a country with few stars, Domingo Tapia is the framer of stars. The contradiction is obvious, but since this story already seems stranger than fiction, we’ll ignore it. Tapia does not only transform a fine piece on canvas, cardboard or paper into a refined work of art, he also understands precisely what the task of a framer is in the 21st century: to contain the work, to highlight it with intelligence and a modern spirit, and, if possible, to make it shine through details that may have even escaped the artist. In Uruguay, Tapia has worked for the best, but mentioning this would be pointless if we failed to also note that he has come to know them well and understand them. We are, of course, talking about Ernesto Vila, Carlos Musso, Carlos Seveso, Martín Verges, Lacy Duarte and Marcelo Legrand.

For the past 15 years Tapia has been exploring the depths of the relationship between works and their limits, and when on July 24, 2010, in an interview featured in the Uruguayan newspaper El Observador, he was asked, “What Uruguayan artists who are not very well-known today will be talked about by future generations?,” he immediately responded with the name Santiago Paulós.

At that time, Tapia said, “This is a man who trained in Álvaro Amengual’s studio but who is on a permanent quest and has his own, very clearly-defined style.” At that point, Paulós had already emerged as a promise, as in 2004 he had been awarded first prize by the Batuz Foundation Sachsen, in 2006 he had been a Paul Cézanne Prize finalist, in 2008 he had been accepted into a workshop conducted by the Spanish artist Antonio López , and, most importantly, he had been selected from over two thousand candidates by none other than Alfonso Emilio Pérez Sánchez, former director of the Museo del Prado, as one of the 20 young recipients of a scholarship to study in the Antonio Gala Foundation in Córdoba, Spain.

Now, at 28, he has national contemporary art collectors fighting over his works. Why? In the first place, because he is a painter with an innate gift. Secondly, because he is an academic artist who excels at his craft, but not for the sake of executing it with empty virtuosity or turning it into a politically-correct discourse. Paulós is not concerned with finding justifications for his paintings, simply because his paintings need no justification. His work is not the work of an intellectual preoccupied with making a better world, but rather of a man who does not believe in relativisms and who is thus still moved by beauty, just as he was that very first time in his hometown of San José de Mayo when, eclipsed by a cloudy afternoon, he saw a reproduction of a painting by Joan Miró that would stay with him forever.

It happens that for Paulós painting is a nonnegotiable trade. After a drink too many and at the risk of sounding cliché, he might go as far as admitting that it is a nonnegotiable passion. But that passion -a luxury that he has allowed himself to indulge in- has seen him rise, fall and rise again, roller-coasting until at last he found stability.
If you look back at his work, you will find his first experiments in 2003; some hyperrealist works in 2004 that are among the best works of his young career; and a year 2006 in which he shines in all his splendor, with his permanent obsession with the human figure, his talent and his instinct for capturing the subjects of his portraits -that aura emanating from individuals and their surroundings which only geniuses like Carlos María Herrera and Carlos Federico Sáez have been able to seize-.

There were, admittedly, insignificant or even weak years: 2005, unnecessarily macabre; 2008, light like pop art, but not as original; and 2009, when Paulós’ expressiveness was at its finest but his palette had still not fully emerged. “Lucian Freud” and “Abuela, Androginia” (Grandmother, Androginia), from 2004, “Émile Zola,” from 2006, and “Payaso 2” (Clown 2) from 2007, marked the highest points of his painting career until then.

But from mid-2010 to early 2011, Paulós finally found his own language, a feat that so many painters with an unquestionable mastery of technique spend their whole lives frustratingly trying to achieve. Now, the poetic beauty of “Azul” (Blue), the amusing madness of “Rocío,” and the venomous mystery of “Tenista” (Tennis Player) have come to accompany a masterpiece that encapsulates his universe. That masterpiece is called “Sombrero blanco” (White Hat), and, with a more finished sense of synthesis, it contains the humanism, depth and expression that have always characterized his work, but now with a maturity and a renewed command of fragmentation and color that have sparked Eduardo Cardozo’s enthusiasm. And which would have certainly made old Anhelo Hernández repeat the appreciation he uttered a few years ago when he saw an Eva Olivetti exhibit: “At last, real painting.”

Pablo Cohen
Culture editor of Búsqueda, Uruguay