«I search, I don't find». Amador García dares to contradict the great totem of 20th century art. Picasso did indeed say once that his thing wasn't searching, but finding. And find he did… Amador, for his part, believes that what matters isn't the destination but setting off on a trip, an expedition through the latest tendencies in art, without losing sight of the 20th century avant-gardes.
The zigzagging trip
Real art simmers slowly, that's the only way the substance comes out. Amador García knows it, and that's why he's never been in a hurry to cook up his artwork. Settling into a style isn't a clause you're obliged to comply with. Skipping it has let him experiment with all sorts of themes and techniques.
A few months ago, for instance, we enjoyed a digital project built on the use of Photoshop in which the Andalusian artist played with collages of old photographs, faces, sculptures and details from paintings, resulting in pieces of a mischievous and, at times, unsettling surrealism.
Not for nothing does the painter, born in Aljaraque (Huelva), have plenty of experience in design, a side of him he puts to use in his painting without any fuss. He graduated in Applied Arts and Artistic Crafts in Seville in 1990 and spent his professional life in graphic design and poster work at a well-known department store. In the end, Amador García decided he owed more time to his art.
The first stage of his painting is called «retazos», in his own words, and in it different artistic tendencies come together. Amador's «zigzagging trip» through his own art then led into his «volumetrías», where he dropped the figures and experimented with essential volumes based on both natural and engineered elements.
From there he moved on to scrapyards… He travelled a good part of his province photographing car scrapyards and then drew on those snapshots to work in a more realistic style, one that contrasted with his earlier volumetrías.
Last stop: urban landscapes
At his last exhibition in Punta Umbría a few years ago we could already spot the «station» where Amador García was going to stop for a while: a kind of urban landscape in which the figures claim their space again.
Working in acrylic on board and in small format, the Andalusian painter has produced a series of artworks that can leave the viewer perplexed on an emotional level. The coldness with which the figures are placed in a clean, essential space, dominated by straight lines and substantial volumes, can raise a smile just as easily as a grimace of unease.
What's going on in those urban landscapes? The deliberate lack of connection between figures and surroundings, the total absence of atmosphere, create that disorientation that also turned up in De Chirico's sensational metaphysical landscapes. Some of the titles in this series, like La Sombra es alargada or El de la gorra, seem to suggest that Amador García has filtered these very sui generis urban landscapes through a bit of humour.
That said, his latest digital experiments suggest that the painter from Huelva is already packing his suitcase to set off again in a new artistic direction.
We invite you to visit Amador García's gallery on Artelista.
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