Black Trunk of the Pharaoh

Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop is delighted to announce the opening of Black Trunk of the Pharaoh, an exhibition of paintings by José Carlos Naranjo and Alan Sastre, artists from Spain living and working in London.

Black Trunk of the Pharaoh relates to the mystery of inspiration and the inexplicable source of creativity. Asked about his aesthetic principles, the celebrated singer of cante jondo (deep song) Manuel Torres replied that he never allowed himself to be carried away by the ordinary or the overly familiar, “In cante jondo, what one has to look for and find, is the black trunk of the pharaoh.” Analogous to Torres’ search, the two painters in this exhibition are looking for the black trunk, an Iberian version of Pandora’s Box that was opened to unleash all evils into the world, leaving only hope behind.

José Carlos Naranjo shows two series of paintings working across abstraction and figuration. ‘After the Waterseller’ is a meditation on his first experience of seeing painting as a child, Velazquez’ The Waterseller of Seville. Remembering nothing of the distribution of forms or the faces of the figures, he seeks to recover through painting the powerful sensation he had that painting was for him and he would follow it. The other series exhibited is an ongoing engagement with Goya’s six small paintings made for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna on the theme of witchcraft and the supernatural.

Alan Sastre ‘Blind Paintings’ are a series of smaller paintings so called because the results are unknowable. Working in an aesthetic key developed from 20th Century Spanish and American abstract traditions, Sastre has developed a process for painting whereby each stage becomes forgotten or unknown, and only very occasionally is the final peeling back of latex a revelation. In larger works Sastre opens a dialogue on the nature of the painted gesture; close inspection of the painted surface reveals the impasto drips and swipes as painterly illusion.

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue featuring an essay by artist and writer Benjamin Cockett.

The approach to painting of both José Carlos Naranjo and Alan Sastre suggest a rigid point of questioning. At what point does the painterly; the natural flow of paint across a surface, become conditioned by a need to de-mystify? Painterly means an engagement with the surface of the painting, a full understanding of the materiality of paint. If paint moves then a painterly artist will move with it, declaring the surface to be fluid, alive. That the surface is in fact paint is an open declaration, as significant as the fact that paintings can also be windows into another space, whether based on traditional ideas about perspective, or the space created by looking into a monochrome colour.