Putting someone on a pedestal has always been painting's most direct declaration of power. The elevation itself raises the figure above common mortals and into the realm of the symbol, like a bronze general on horseback whose importance, it seems, is measured in metres. The painter gives this monumental treatment to his own grandfather.
He places his figure in a town that is nowhere in particular, with smooth, sun-bleached walls, and leaves him completely alone, a spectacle without an audience.
Painted in 2009, Abuelo belongs to a body of work that found its strangeness in the world as it is, before the artist made the leap to the synthetic monsters born of generative algorithms. The awkward gatherings in his watercolours from that time, as in "Student Flat I", and the anonymous figures in oils like "Passers-by", are studies of the quiet friction of everyday life. Years later, in works like "Angel III", the strangeness would be biological, a matter of impossible bodies. Here, the strangeness is purely situational: a matter of a man, an object and a place that do not fit together.
The painting stages a public absurdity: a man turned into a statue against the sky. The title, Abuelo, anchors it in the most private of relationships. The work is not about greatness, but about the strange roles we are sometimes asked to play and the quiet dignity in the mere act of keeping your balance. He is not a symbol. He is the artist's grandfather, on a slide, having a very weird day.
