ANTONIO ROJAS

Tarifa 1962

Lives and works in Madrid

Linked with the New Spanish Figuration through the relationship with Carlos Alcolea, Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Chema Cobo. Linked to the neo-metaphysical painting resulting from his participation in the El retorno del hijo pródigo (The return of the prodigal Son) exhibition.

Antonio Rojas focuses his research on the creation of pictorial models that simulate thoughts, memories and bizarre speculations, paying special attention to space, conceived as the fundamental category in which the mind is structured. To this end, strategies based on the composition of shapes and colors on a surface without hierarchies are valued. He builds the pictorial space based on personal approaches of multiple illusions that favor the simultaneity of plans and perspectives in order to challenge the perception of reality. A process of random overlapping of images from memory and articulated by monotonous and repeated tonal gradations typical of dreamscape lighting.

This ironic detachment of the representation and that, which is represented, obtained through poetic power of the paradoxes produced by their perceptual traps, causes uncertainty and alienation in the viewer. In the works of Rojas, everything appears and disappears constantly. Shadows seek their own images, and quotes and key pictorial strategies from the Renaissance or the Vanguard, are quietly hidden.

The space between things becomes as important as the volume that forms it, thereby achieving that space ceases to be empty and the air that comes between it turns into a pictorial surface of vibrant density. This use of the artifice of painting, manages to make the vacuum, the place where mystery dwells.

To paint flat what he begins to paint as a conventional perspective, and vice versa, a conception of the picture as two-dimensional surface is favored over the forms that are simplified by lines and volumes. Rojas makes use of props of representation oriented to hide them, paradoxically, everything that he wants you to see.

Highlighted among his themes include the insistent interpretations of Tarifa Port and his iconography, with which Rojas restructures his perception of the world in plastic form. Works, inter-connected through time in search of a global sense of place.

Among the pictorial references the following painters are highlighted: Piero della Francesca, Paul Cezanne, Giorgio de Chirico, Kazimir Malevich, Rene Magritte or Frank Stella.

Consulted bibliography: Cobo, Chema, “Un sueño en espiral”; De Castro, María Antonia, “Los hombres del mar” y Bonet, Juan Manuel, “Geometría y enigma”, in the exhibition catalogue Antonio Rojas. La mirada oblicua, Madrid, Museo de Teruel / Diputación Provincial de Cádiz. Andrés Ruiz, Enrique, “Las dos memorias de Antonio Rojas”, in the exhibition catalogue Antonio Rojas. Horizonte y memoría, Bilbao, Galería Juan Manuel Lumbreras, 2004. Andrés Ruiz, Enrique, “Sentimiento y orden” in the exhibition catalogue Antonio Rojas, Madrid, Galería Antonio Machón, 1997.