Alfredo Gavaldón

Fibrous spaces, overlaid spaces, scattered spaces. What does the eye capture when going through these landscapes? Does it pan them like a movie camera? Is it pushed and pulled back, moving irregularly to and fro between entirety and detail? Alfredo Gavaldón stands at the gates of a kingdom that is not that of nature. The scenery of his land- scaping is neither arboreal, nor mountainous, nor arable, but carved by straight lines, by paths. His landscapes are voyages through space, lines that are laid and laid across and can perhaps be explained as life paths, as journeys, as time. Suddenly, that word comes up: explain... We will do our best to make plastic sense of the work of this artist.

For reasons of principle, Gavaldón does not explain his pictorial work; he prefers to see it wander through the viewer ́s eyes. Is there anything to explain? Yes, the fold. In every pictorial landscape, there are folds. In a marina, the horizon between sea and sky is a primary fold to which cloudscapes and ripples can be added, successive folds that break on the coast. In terrestrial landscapes, the lines mark anfractuosities, geographical reliefs and distances. All this, to focus on the depth of the fields. Lines, strokes and color form the display. Each line is a pictorial crease, a drawing. Instead of with a brush, Alfredo Gavaldón outlines his paths by pasting long and thin ribbons to the surface of his paintings. They unfold and overflow in polyptychs that leave to the viewer the choice of forming their shapes or arranging their parts, so that one painting changes into others, themselves, in turn, transformable. A horizontal polyptych becomes vertical; it forms a new quadrangle from its squares, finds a way to divide itself or ultimately breaks up. The roads meet, intersect and separate, fold and refold, fixing into the horizon a succession of uneven steps in which there is no vanishing point. The viewer heads towards the depth of the surface and finds in Gavaldón's paintings a complex clarity. The artist smiles. These are the kind of opposite subjects he loves to bring up. Now, a close relative of “explain” appears: complexity.

There are many synonyms of "explain" and each one may cross or overlap: we can interpret, translate, comment, clarify... expose, but the origin of the term "ex-plain" is to unfold, unfold the folds. He unfolds them, letting the viewer's eyes fixate, as Romanticism did, on the never-ending landscape. What do we read between those lines? The meaning of our lives? What do we read in a painting? Maybe we do not even read it... Oh, what a mess! Alfredo Gavaldón's proposal is an art in which the path - the relation between two points – displaces the pictorial representation. Its lines: traffic jam, aerial wiring, underground current, waves crashing on the shore or grooves in the desert, electromagnetic waves, the perpendicular night approach of an aircraft to an airport runway, light trails of a surgical airstrike, the encounter of two amid many, rain against the rainbow, emptiness cut off by secant lines or "our lives are the rivers that flow into the sea of Death”. Our own projections?

We, the viewers, pretend we can scan the vistas that these paintings show from left to right and even from top to bottom, as if they were texts. However, let's not fool ourselves: the average eye’s scanning of a pictorial surface (according to laboratory data) has nothing to do with the plough-like lines written on the page of a book. As proven by eyescan diagrams, eye movements, when looking at a picture, resemble complex scribbles that piece together leaps, sudden stops, setbacks, revisions, approaches to detail and connections between distant elements, so that the order of explanation -the unfolding of the folds- is the order of complexity. Explanation and complexity come together. Let us appreciate these two aspects of Alfredo Gavaldón's paintings: the rigor of abstract, which becomes pleasure walking.

— Jaime Moreno Villarreal, translation: Ana Synider