The Celebrtion of the Gaze (2021)

Within the landscape, the horizon embodies the frustration of the gaze in seeing beyond the contemplative reach of the human eye. It not only organizes the division between sky and earth, but draws the line that defines and makes visible a limit; the limits of the human gaze. In landscape painting, the representation of the horizon involves the forgetting of the other artificial limits that the surface of the painting implies: the limits of the canvas or the support of the pictorial image.

Pere de Ribot is not a landscape painter, at least not in the classical sense of the term, although he thoroughly explores the landscape as the main theme in most of his work. But to do so, he doesn’t stand with his easel before a field nor does he make graphic or photographic sketches to represent a specific fragment of the world. His is a work of interior exploration, in which the landscape is not found outside the window but rather within the memories and experiences of a lifetime. With his roots formed mainly within the abstract and informal tradition, Pere de Ribot came to landscape later on, when he realized that reality has a place in his work and something demanded he find a way to make it present; in particular, the reality that excites him most: the environment, the space that gives rise to human life and which also takes part in shaping it. It is thanks to this that we can contemplate these large format landscapes in his work that recall, always non-specifically, the plain of the Empordà and its tranquil spaciousness. The horizon here is the star of the show, articulating the whole of each painting and is often one of the few lines that appear clearly defined. The other forms are diffuse, strangely overshadowed by colour and light, as well as by the sensuality of the textures that are superimposed and played with in order to embroider a fabric of sensations, typical of the known world, with a painterly artifice. The boundaries of the canvas often appear behind the painting, not as a frame, but as a testimony to aesthetic artifice.

In a quadrangular piece, a group of trees, suggested with spots and lines of various thicknesses, project from the red and bluish earth over a pink sky that decomposes into fragments like broken glass; the corresponding surfaces are precisely the realm where creative freedom is unleashed in the painter’s gestures, in the drips, or stains achieved by applying solvents or other distortion techniques to the oil paint. The work is unequivocally a landscape, but one in which reality does not appear transfigured through painting, but rather is distilled through form. It is in the material itself where a certain evocation of the natural world is found, almost in a dreamlike way, like the latent image that persists in memory when you close your eyes. The colours, unnatural but decidedly sensual, are also an expression of this freedom the painter has when approaching the piece, imbuing it with the emotional impulses awakened by the environment to which the artist constantly returns, in the same way that the emotions also transform the environment.

His is a gaze that celebrates the landscape as a constant discovery; the repetition of the theme allows him to delve deeper into it, accessing it each time with more knowledge, like someone peeling fruit, layer by layer, to reach the seed, the essence. With each piece, it further purifies the landscape but from which he also extracts new fruit, a new artistic artefact that is, in essence, a talisman of the affectionate and joyful look at nature that creates everything and, at the same time, an aesthetic object loaded with life and its own characteristics. Thus each painting is a further step inside rather than a step forward.

However, the theme can also evolve according to the needs of the artist. In his search for freedom when experimenting with the palette of colours, shapes and textures, Pere de Ribot has recently found a form of landscape that has proved fertile ground for his pictorial imagination: the underwater landscape. In some manner, the seabed serves as a certain return to abstraction for him or, rather, a place in which his captivated gaze towards reality converges with his artistic impulse, where formal freedom gains even more strength. The glazes, already present in the surface landscapes, become much bolder and the planes of depth blur and become vague. Rocks, underwater vegetation and fish coexist with water, itself the great ally of the artist as a distorter of the figurative world. In some cases we can find a formal substitute for the horizon and, in others, it remains further up; the world that fits into the picture has expanded due to its vagueness. Light also helps to expand these worlds, as the painter uses it to suggest contrasts and progressions in depth. In some of the recent, most intense pieces, however, the depth is limited to displaying both formal and chromatic minimalism, reaching almost total abstraction through the depiction of water and its reflections.

Despite this, the mindset of the underwater landscapes does not differ in essence from that of the previous landscapes. De Ribot always discovers them once he has started working on the canvas as if it were an abstract painting, where intuitively he then begins to make the trace of reality appear. The process is the opposite of the classic landscape: instead of observing and drawing it to then fill it with colour, it is through colour that an imaginary view is recovered. The space shown does not exist; it is born with the work in the form of a background murmur that claims its presence. Who knows if the origin is the result of the accumulation of the contemplative experience of the painter; the daily coexistence with the environment, which is found here reduced to its essence. So much so that it is not only the essence of a specific place, but rather he tends to capture what is universal in the landscape as an environment contemplated by those who inhabit it. However, he usually does so with an explosion of elements; of trees, rocks, clouds, fish, coral, but also with chromatic nuances and thicknesses of paint, rhythmic gestures applied over the pigments, gradations of light. And in capturing the essential, he doesn’t resort to minimalism but to the pleasure of the abundance, transporting onto the canvas the gratitude for what fills the artist with joy with regards the contemplated world: the burst of life and details, the largest display of objects, shapes, colours and light. On each canvas, he seems to attest to the impossibility of making all that wealth, present outside, appear. Just as the gaze is limited, so is the representation. Pere de Ribot breaks the scopic frustration by evoking this immensity, its beauty and exuberance, freeing the work from limits. Only in this way is the work able, not to describe the landscape, but rather to invoke it, to share with those who observe it the joy of its contemplation.

Alexandre Roa Casellas.
Art critic