Los motivos del eremita. Gerardo Delgado circa 2024

CAC MÁLAGA CENTRO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO DE MÁLAGA 5 DICIEMBRE 2023 / 18 FEBRERO 2024 5 DECEMBER 2023 / 18 FEBRUARY 2024 GERARDO DELGADO ESTRUCTURAS Y TRAMAS EXPOSICIÓN Fernando Francés Comisarios Helena Juncosa Almudena Ríos Gestión Cultural y Comunicación, S. L. Organización y Coordinación Mihail E. Plesanu Daniel Santana Montaje TDM. Transportes y Montajes de Arte, S. L. Transporte Ferrer & Ojeda Asociados Seguro CATÁLOGO Daniel Bilbao José Joaquín Parra Bañón Textos Jose González Antonio Muñoz Marta Salado Fotografía Alberto Ricca Diseño Polisemia, S. L. Traducción Imprenta J. Martínez, S. L. Impresión ISBN: 978-84-127630-1-0 Depósito Legal: MA 1155-2023 © de las obras, Gerardo Delgado © de los textos y las fotografías, sus autores © de la edición, Gestión Cultural y Comunicación, S. L. - CAC Málaga AGRADECIMIENTOS Nuestro agradecimiento muy especial a Gerardo Delgado sin cuyo apoyo, implicación y entusiasmo esta exposición no hubiera sido posible. El artista quiere dar su agradecimiento a “Antonio Muñoz, mi más profundo agradecimiento por su ayuda en mi estudio y su compromiso con mi obra“. C/ Alemania, s/n. 29001 Málaga Telf.: 34 952 208 500 e-mail: [email protected] web: www.cacmalaga.eu AYUNTAMIENTO DE MÁLAGA Francisco de la Torre Prados Alcalde Mariana Pineda Tte. de Alcalde Delegada de Cultura y Patrimonio Histórico Susana Martín Directora General de Cultura Ángela Solano Jefa del Servicio Jurídico de Cultura CAC MÁLAGA José Luis Díaz Director Gerente Helena Juncosa Directora Artística Almudena Ríos Exposiciones Iván Berdión Pilar Díaz Antonio Ramos Educación y Actividades Públicas Ester García Ana Ramos Biblioteca Alberto Ricca Marta Salado Omar Poveda Comunicación e Imagen Gonzalo Molano Mihail E. Plesanu Departamento Técnico Pilar Fernández de Molina Magdalena Liáñez Administración Presentación / Foreword 7 Gerardo Delgado. Estructuras y tramas 9 DANIEL BILBAO Los motivos del eremita. Gerardo Delgado, circa 2024 16 JOSÉ JOAQUÍN PARRA BAÑÓN Obras / Works 48 Lista de obras / List of works 98 Currículum / Curriculum 103 Textos en inglés / English texts 108 Cualquier forma de reproducción, distribución, comunicación pública o transformación de esta obra solo puede ser realizada con la autorización de sus titulares, salvo excepción prevista por la ley. Diríjase a CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos) si necesita fotocopiar o escanear algún fragmento de esta obra <http://www.conlicencia.com> Tel.: 91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 47 ÍNDICE |CONTENTS 17 LOS MOTIVOS DEL EREMITA. GERARDO DELGADO, CIRCA 2024 JOSÉ JOAQUÍN PARRA BAÑÓN XII LAGAR SAN JOAQUÍN El estudio del pintor Gerardo Delgado Pérez en Olivares, esquinado en el aljarafe hispalense, ocupa el vientre de una bodega larga y profunda: como parcialmente recuerdan en negro y blanco unos azulejos que perviven en la fachada, de la antigua Bodega san Joaquín. El taller del Artista, según sus recuerdos, primero fue un lagar que contuvo racimos, pámpanos y barricas de madera, bocoyes que después también sirvieron, cuando el almacén se destinó a cobijar la cosecha de oliva, para madurar aceitunas en salmuera. Uvas y aceitunas, vides y acebuches, parras y olivos, Dionisos y Ateneas tutelares alternándose la soberanía. El vino y el aceite de la que fuera la casa ancestral de su abuela subsisten como ecos, como perfumes fantasmales, como pigmentos entre los cuatro muros que delimitan el espacio creativo, bajo los faldones de la techumbre a cuatro aguas que aún conserva casi intactas las cerchas. Allí, en la urdimbre del lienzo y en las vetas ilusorias de la madera artificial prensada en tableros rectangulares, teje el pintor sus más recientes hilaturas polícromas: arma sus Estructuras y tramas1. Allí produce las intersecciones de las bandas bermejas, azules, amarillas o verdes, de las pardas y de las negras que grapan espacios. Allí provoca los cruces de los caminos que ponen en contacto los bordes del cuadro; labra el machihembrado de los tablones convertidos en vigas para la construcción Transfixión de tres firmamentos gerardodelgados por una misma Lamy roja © jjparrabañón, 2024 19 de artesonados sin fondo y sin simetría. Y allí y en sus aledaños, subiendo y bajando del otro estudio, el íntimo que contiene la nave doméstica que discurre convergente al otro lado, compuso los collages con cartulinas recortadas que conserva el Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía en Madrid (Estructura modular variable, 1971), modeló las piezas escultóricas que figuran en su inventario provisional (Estructura móvil, Juguete modular para Conchita) e ideó al principio de su trayectoria, según refiere Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Silva, carteles alternativos para las ferias locales. Allí, en el seno de la ballena varada en el olivar del altozano, redactó sus textos sintéticos, ordenó las fotografías que algún día remoto tomó del mundo, y que alguna vez expuso, y maquetó arquitectónicamente las decenas de catálogos realizados por encargo institucional, entre cuyas portadas deambulan hermanados Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, Richard Deacon, Enzo Cucchi, David Salle, Julian Schnabel o Francisco Zurbarán. Allí, acompañado por Morton Feldman, ha registrado los rastros de los gases de los reactores de cien aeronaves acrobáticas cruzándose en el aire. Estelas de miríadas de embarcaciones a motor arando el agua en todas direcciones después de que Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, o bien sus herederos, hubieran vertido en la laguna veneciana los tintes que el granadino custodiaba en el palacio Martinego. Allí es donde el Pintor engendra líneas y da a luz triángulos y otros polígonos irregulares, trazos de un ancho constante que se clavan unos en otros dando lugar a formas agudas mientras surcan los universos variegados aún en formación que Gerardo Delgado imagina, a los que les da consistencia dibujándolos, pintándolos como si fuera el primer día de la creación. 1 Durante unas horas del 23.11.23 la exposición en el CAC Málaga se tituló, debido a un sugerente equívoco ortotipográfico, E(x)tructuras y tramas: la reivindicación de las intersecciones, el elogio de la equis geométrica, la defensa de los cruzamientos, la invocación de los ángulos incisivos y la veneración de la línea que se bifurca y se trifurca se ponía así de manifiesto desde el umbral. Pero el quiasma fue sustituido por la sierpe, la fractura por la suave continuidad de la ese, la cruz por el perfil de la cadera afrodisiaca, y la estructura ilegal se sometió a la estructura legítima. 2 Las obras de Gerardo Delgado que se incluyen en Los motivos del eremita han sido fotografiadas por el escritor en el estudio del artista y corresponden a diversos momentos y fases de su proceso de construcción. Se trata, en consecuencia, de fragmentos descontextualizados que han sido intervenidos y alterados, así como transformada la tónica de su paleta de colores, para adecuarlos al texto al que hacen silenciosa compañía. Exterior e interior de la periferia del estudio gerardodelgado / Exterior and interior of the periphery of the gerardodelgado studio © jjparrabañón, 20232 21 XIII RAZONES DEL PÁJARO SOLITARIO Sentados en el eremitorio alrededor de un Entramado angular, vigilados por varias Escuadras oblicuas ahombradas contra los paramentos, en presencia de Daniel Bilbao, hablamos del escritor Juan de la Cruz. De lo que el abulense, el párvulo tejedor de velos vestido de carmelita, postuló en los “Puntos de amor” de sus Avisos espirituales: Las condiciones del pájaro solitario son cinco. La primera, que se va a lo más alto; la segunda, que no sufre compañía, aunque sea de su naturaleza; la tercera, que pone el pico al aire; la cuarta, que no tiene determinado color; la quinta, que canta suavemente. Las cuales ha de tener el alma contemplativa: que se ha de subir sobre las cosas transitorias, no haciendo más caso de ellas que si no fuesen; y ha de ser tan amiga de la soledad y silencio, que no sufra compañía de otra criatura; ha de poner el pico al aire del Espíritu Santo, correspondiendo a sus inspiraciones, para que, haciéndolo así, se haga más digna de su compañía; no ha de tener determinado color, no teniendo determinación en ninguna cosa, sino en lo que es voluntad de Dios; ha de cantar suavemente en la contemplación y amor de su Esposo. El pájaro solitario, dijo Juan de Yepes Álvarez antes de que Benedicto XIII lo impulsara definitivamente a los altares, no tiene determinado color: es de cualquier color porque en él están contenidos todos los colores, tanto los posibles como los imaginables. El pájaro solitario, sospecha el Comentarista, es el compendio del color. El color es un pájaro solitario que aúna cinco virtudes que no son teologales. El alma contemplativa, añade el poeta fundador de conventos, no ha de tener determinado color. El alma solitaria no sufre compañía: no padece dolor alguno cuando prescinde de la compañía de las criaturas que se expresan con estridencia. En las estructuras lineales de Gerardo Delgado es perceptible la mística, la manufactura de los cendales transparentes y el espíritu de la trigonometría provocativa. En ellas son reconocibles las jaulas sin puerta, las pajareras abiertas que imitan a los nidos que ahí fuera, en las copas de los árboles, lejos de los aleros, se redondean con pequeñas ramas, con papeles de caramelos y con madejas de hebras de lana trenzada. Bocetos y esquemas gerardodelgados (Ruta de San Mateo) / Gerardodelgado sketches and diagrams (Ruta de San Mateo [St Matthew’s Way]) © jjparrabañón, 2023 23 XIV TODAS LAS FORMAS DE LA MELANCOLÍA «He sufrido todas las formas de la melancolía absurda -he añorado países que nunca he visto, y he anhelado ser lo que no podía serpero todos esos estados de ánimo eran triviales comparados con mi premonición de la muerte», escribe John Cheever al inicio de uno de los párrafos intermedios del relato El ladrón de Shady Hill. Aquel que, traducido por Aníbal Leal, concluye diciendo: «En la tenue luz nocturna que entraba por las ventanas la casa parecía una concha, un nautilo, un ente creado para contener su propia forma». Este Comentarista ignora cuáles son las formas absurdas de la melancolía y cuáles son, intercambiando los términos, las melancolías absurdas, aunque quizá haya experimentado algunas de ellas, y no sabe si el Pintor ha conocido a una de las benefactoras, a todas las lesivas o a ninguna: ni siquiera si a él esos estados le parecen o no triviales comparados con la prescindible premonición de la muerte. Pero de lo que sí está absolutamente seguro es de que el estudio del Pintor, al que su casa se adhiere como una protuberancia calcárea y hueca, como una prótesis necesaria conectada mediante un hiato que nunca se cierra, es un ente creado para contener su propia forma o, alterando de nuevo el orden de los factores, una forma creada para contener a su propio ente. Al igual que el laberinto para el monstruo (según Apolodoro), o el monstruo para el laberinto (según Borges), una está hecha para el otro: creada por el otro. Es preciso recordar que Gerardo Delgado es arquitecto de formación y ensayista esporádico. Al fondo del estudio, en la zona de la biblioteca en la que los libros aguardan turno para ser ordenados en la balda respectiva, envejece la página huérfana de un periódico antiguo en la que se ve, a todo color y medio tamaño, la reproducción de una soberana Lucrecia de Artemisia Gentileschi que, previa a su suicidio, puñal en alto, ilustra un artículo de la sección cultural del diario. Extendido, el pliego de papel preserva del polvo atmosférico que se arremolina en la canícula veraniega el rincón de un ejemplar de El oído melancólico y parte de otro de Arquitectura de la melancolía. Uno de ellos contiene un marcapáginas por el capítulo en el que se descuartizan los procesos creativos relacionados con la acidia. Cerca reposa un catálogo conteniendo una Gerardodelgadomaquia subtitulada Sermón de las once palabras, redactada en 2020, de la que el excurso Gerardo Delgado, circa 2024. Las condiciones del pájaro solitario, es continuación. [XIV] Escenarios de la biblioteca plástica gerardodelgada / [XIV] Scenarios of the plastic gerardodelgado library © jjparrabañón, 2023 25 La Anunciación de Fray Gerardo Fernández / The Annunciation by Fray Gerardo Fernández © jjparrabañón, 2023 XV ANUNCIACIONES Y RENDICIONES Si se desbarataran las rigurosas cuadrículas de las catorce piezas que determinan la Ruta de san Mateo conservadas en el CAAC; si se tergiversaran los crucigramas que originaron esas ordenadísimas solerías de reiterativas piezas disímiles; si se abatieran a derecha e izquierda, entremetiéndose unas en otras, las veintinueve lanzas enhiestas (treinta si se suma la incompleta) de Diego Velázquez en La rendición de Breda; si se inclinaran los árboles de los bosques sembrados o defendidos con astiles y palos por Joseph Beuys, o los hayedos intervenidos por Agustín Ibarrola; si se desplomaran las columnas y, desequilibrándose como las de los templos abatidas por los gigantes según Giulio Romano en el Palacio del Té de Mantua, entrecruzando sus fustes antes de quebrarse, se hallarían los gérmenes de las últimas composiciones gerardodelgadas. Los entrecruzamientos de sus varales apócrifos también proceden de las anunciaciones virginales: de aquellas góticas en las que María de Nazaret, que permanece sentada o que se pone en pie ante la sorpresa de la intromisión del arcángel Gabriel en su espacio privado, cruza sus brazos sobre el pecho, no está claro si como señal de aceptación de su embarazo o como gesto defensivo, si de constricción o de súbito rechazo a la noticia dramática que le trasmite en mensajero inoportuno. Los brazos núbiles pintados por Fray Angélico hacia 1425, o por Murillo hacia 1660, de entre las que residen en el Museo del Prado, o por Alejo Fernández entre uno y otro (Anunciación, h. 1508. Óleo sobre tabla, 72 x 49,5 cm.) en esa soberbia habitación que, marginada por la crítica, cuelga en la sala II del Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla, en la que una columna de pórfido y oro gobierna el espacio poseído. Aunque de las anunciaciones angelicales, góticas y renacentistas, lo que Gerardo Delgado rescata no son tanto los brazos cruzados cuanto las filacterias en las que están impresas las palabras que se pronuncian. Las filacterias enredándose unas en otras: copulando aéreas unas con otras, sutiles, mudas, venciendo el pudor, compenetrándose mientras se acarician. 27 Gerardo Delgado dentro de la Anunciación según Tiziano de Gerhard Richter (1973. Óleo sobre lienzo, 125 x 200 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basilea) / Gerardo Delgado inside the Annunciation after Titian by Gerhard Richter (1973. Oil on canvas, 125 x 200 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel) © jjparrabañón, 2023 XVI TIZIANO EN RICHTER Gerhard Richter quiso poseer una Anunciación de Tiziano Vecellio: dada la imposibilidad de conseguirlo, como alternativa, en 1973 decidió hacerse una copia a partir de una fotografía. De una postal. De la Anunciación que el intérprete evangélico pintó hacia el 1539 al óleo sobre un lienzo de 166 x 266 centímetros que aún cuelga en la Scuola Grande de la Arciconfraternitá di San Rocco, en Venecia. Pero no pudo reproducirla. Llevó a cabo cuatro o seis tentativas: cinco intentos, cinco estaciones en un proceso analítico que quedaría inconcluso. En el primero, los lienzos se parecían; eran casi idénticos, y de ahí el fracaso, porque el objetivo no era la reproducción mimética del aspecto sino la extracción de la esencia: la decantación de las sensaciones. Hasta que no extenuó la versión de Tiziano retrotrayéndola a su origen, al conjunto de sensaciones materializas en manchas desde las que partió el veneciano, el alemán no se detuvo. Agonía es la palabra que define ese movimiento de regreso al principio, al gen, a la sustancia a partir de la cual se genera la multitud abastecida por las demás. Hay apoyadas en el suelo y acodadas en los muros, embaladas en cartones, protegidas por plásticos burbujeantes, abarloadas en el estudio del Pintor anunciaciones y crucifixiones, natividades y descendimientos, huidas a Egipto y martirios, meninas y paisajes sin girasoles, grandes vidrios y sansebastianes solteros que descienden escaleras al ritmo de las bachianas de Heitor Villa-Lobos, al compás de la luz que disuelve las nubes y las estabula en polígonos de colores elementales (a los que él llama Escuadras oblicuas). La categoría en la que el catálogo razonado de la obra de Richter incluye sus anunciaciones es “Pintura fotográfica”, aunque también las vincula a la sección de “Pintura indeterminada”. El catálogo razonado de las obras completas de Gerardo Delgado precisará de la invención de otras categorías polifónicas y profanas. Exigirá renunciar, en cualquier caso, a las consabidas: a la abstracción geométrica y a la geometría abstracta, al suprematismo y al neoplasticismo, a Josef Albers y a Elena Asins. 29 XVII METÁFORA DE LA CUCHARA POLIDROGODEPENDIENTE ¿Qué correspondencias podrían establecerse entre Tintoretto y Gerardo Delgado? ¿Qué tienen que ver sus diagonales con aquellas que fugan por el suelo y las paredes en la Traslación del cuerpo de san Marcos (1662-66. Gallerie dell’Accademia)? Qué con el cuerpo que cae del cielo en picado en San Marcos liberando al esclavo (1662-66. Gallerie dell’Accademia), y qué con las cornisas en perspectiva del Hallazgo del cuerpo de san Marcos (1662-66. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milán). Nada es igual a nada, propone el axioma filosófico, aunque esta primitiva certeza, en contra de la opinión de ciertos escritores anglosajones, no inhabilita a la metáfora que propone correspondencias: fulgurantes trasiegos de significados entre signos dispares. No se parecen en nada Tiziano Vecellio y Miguel Ángel Buonarroti, ni Picasso se asemeja a Caravaggio. ¿En nada, absolutamente en nada? En nada si se compara la apariencia de sus obras, o si la comparación se establece a distintas horas del día, o con temperaturas diferentes. Las similitudes no son objetivas, no pertenecen al ámbito de la ciencia, sino al nebuloso de la literatura especulativa. El Comentarista no se refiere a la comparación de lo superfluo de las cosas, a la confrontación de identidad de la costra y de la máscara, sino a la búsqueda microscópica de los cromosomas comunes. Tiziano acabó despreciando los pinceles y dibujando con los dedos: no a todos les da tiempo alcanzar esta última sabiduría, a descubrir las cerdas, la pelambrera que, si persevera, al buen pintor le crece al final en las yemas. Gerardo Delgado usa, como dedales, cucharas. Una cuchara metálica con la que adhiere, presionándola por el lado convexo, la cinta Tesa a la tela. Una cuchara sopera que, vista por primera vez navegando a la deriva en el oleaje de la superficie del cuadro, al espectador se le antoja un utensilio del ajuar primario del drogodependiente: del «Polidrogodependiente del láudano del sueño y no de las almenas más altas» acerca del que escribió Blanca Andreu en uno de sus poemas fundacionales, aquel que continuaba diciendo: «vendrá la muerte entre melancólicos palimpsestos que fueron poesía». Cuchara, regla, lápiz, cuaderno, circunferencia y cuchilla sobre un Entramado angular / A spoon, a ruler, a pencil, a notebook, a circumference and a cutter on an Entramado angular [Angular Lattice] © jjparrabañón, 2023 43 XXIV DOMENICO VENEZIANO SE DESVISTE La tabla en la que Domenico Veneziano (h. 1410-61) pintó al temple hacia 1445 a San Juan en el desierto formaba parte del retablo de la Iglesia de Santa Lucia dei Magnoli, en Florencia. Juan, el futuro Juan Bautista, está en ella sorprendente y completamente desnudo, y su cuerpo juvenil no proyecta sombra alguna sobre el suelo cerúleo. Las almas en el infierno, informó Dante Alighieri en su Commedia, tampoco las arrojaban, diferenciándose por este fenómeno los muertos de los vivos. Su desnudez apolínea está justificada porque el pintor florentino lo imagina en el momento de desprenderse de su cómoda y aristocrática vestimenta anterior, que ahora deja caer a sus pies, para sustituirla por una áspera piel sin curtir con la que, según la tradición, se cubrirá a partir de entonces. Reemplazará su ropa mundana por un hábito rudimentario, hecho girones, de pelo de camello o de lana de oveja. Nadie antes había imaginado y compuesto este episodio, del que nada se dice en los evangelios canónicos. Nadie le había dado apariencia a esta metáfora. Ni dibujado esta figura civil, que se santifica al añadirle la aureola dorada; ni este escenario en el que el desierto convencional, armonizado con dunas arenosas, es transformado en un paisaje rocoso, anfractuoso y agrietado, donde la aridez de la tierra se opone a la frondosidad de los matorrales y de las algaidas regadas por un Jordán que, escuálido, imita a las acequias sinuosas que fecundan los secanos. El futuro ermitaño aquí aún carece de refugio, de casa, de cabaña o de cueva. Al igual que en Adán fuera del Paraíso, la arquitectura del vestido precede a la de la construcción y adecuación del medio ambiente. La desnudez de Juan se corresponde con la desnudez radical del entorno: su despojamiento con la desolación de la naturaleza inclemente en la que ha sido abandonado por Domenico. Garduña, hirsuta, escarpada, la tierra arcillosa se descompone en una sucesión quebrada de superficies alargadas, angulosas, cristalinas: una conformación de planos inclinados por el viento contra un cielo que se oscurece hacia el azul en su ascenso. Montañas góticas, horizontes deshabitados, marañas de espinas impenetrables para expresar la más absoluta y radical soledad del hombre: quizá la perpetua e inconsolable soledad del artista a las cinco en punto de la madrugada, cuando los lobos se retiran a lamerse a sus madrigueras. Domenico Veneziano. San Juan en el desierto, h. 1445/50. Temple sobre madera, 28,4 × 31,8 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Colección S. H. Kress. Inv: 1943.4.48 / Domenico Veneziano. Saint John in the Desert, ca. 1445/50. Tempera on wood, 28.4 × 31.8 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. S. H. Kress Collection. Inv. no.: 1943.4.48 Si bien este soberano y célibe Juan del desierto no tiene nada que ver con Gerardo Delgado creando universos en el monacato de su taller naval, las rocas talladas por un dios escultor proclive a las plegaduras múltiples son, podrían ser, precedentes de algunas de sus telas colmadas de cuñas y de esquirlas: de las de las series Estructuras triangulares, Entramados angulares o de Tramas negras y Garabatos geométricos, donde cada faceta de la conformación cristalina adquiere un tono o un color distinto. Las montañas del veneciano, ajenas a los oteros y a los cabezos que jalonan el Guadalquivir son, sin duda, antepasadas de las pirámides multifacéticas de la serie Complex Form de Sol LeWitt, de las más afiladas formas complejas esculpidas en hielo, como cumbres afiladas de iceberg, por el norteamericano. Habría que preguntarle a Gerardo si este Sol, sonriente y con sus gafas redondas de los últimos años, se le aparece en las horas de duermevela y lo anima a seguir buscando paletas de colores en los bazares y en los paños de cocina. La pintura de Gerardo Delgado se alimenta, según intuye este Comentarista, entre otras, de las fuentes de la abstracción que manan en Domenico Veneziano y en Sol LeWitt, tanto en un fragmento de Velázquez (el bastidor del gran lienzo que el sevillano pinta dentro de Las Meninas) como en las aspas del Martirio de san Andrés de Juan de Roelas (1610-15. Óleo sobre lienzo, 520 x 346 cm. Museo de Bellas Artes, Sevilla), así en la hilatura del espacio que Marcel Duchamp delineó en 1942 en Nueva York para First Papers of Surrealism como en la descomposición, agitación y dislocación de los lienzos que Piet Mondrian componía antes de comenzar a bailar en el ámbito secreto de su último estudio neoyorquino. También, sospecha, que lo anima un espíritu brasileño similar al que alentó entre 1956 y 1958 los Planos en superficies moduladas, los Espacios modulados o las Superficies moduladas de Lygia Clark. O los Metaesquemas y los Relieves espaciales de Helio Oiticica, aunque tanto los de ella como los de él desleídos y colocados al contraluz por el Pintor: al trasluz de las realidades desolladas por su cincel. Al fin y al cabo, es en el firmamento donde se enraíza y de donde se nutre la última cosecha de la Bodega san Joaquín: son cielos optimistas, paisajes aéreos ajenos al dramatismo, proyectos de atmósferas del porvenir, jardines con pérgolas y celosías en los que madura sin angustia la existencia, lugares paradisíacos que aguardan el renovado nacimiento de Eva, universos variegados, polícromas vías lácteas sin estrellas, luminosos firmamentos de estelas delineadas con pigmentos esenciales las pinturas que encaminan a Gerardo Delgado hacia 2024. Arcoíris párvulos. 45 Dos paisajes fragmentarios de Gerardo Delgado entreverados en el de San Juan en el desierto de Domenico Veneziano / Two of Gerardo Delgado’s fragmentary landscapes, interwoven with fragments from St John in the Desert by Domenico Veneziano © jjparrabañón, 2023 115 XII LAGAR SAN JOAQUÍN The studio of the painter Gerardo Delgado Pérez in Olivares, on the corner of Seville’s Aljarafe, occupies the belly of a long, deep wine cellar, partial traces of which survive in the black and white tiles on the façade of the old Bodega san Joaquín. The artist’s workshop, according to his memories, was first a winepress that contained bunches of grapes, vine tendrils and wooden casks, huge barrels or bocoyes that later also served, when the warehouse was used to house the olive harvest, to ripen olives in brine. Grapes and olives, vines and olive-trees – both wild and cultured – arbours and branches: the tutelage of Dionysuses and Athenas in alternating sovereignty. The wine and oil of what was his grandmother’s ancestral home subsist like echoes, like ghostly perfumes, like pigments between the four walls that delimit the creative space, under the skirts of the hipped roof that still preserves its trusses almost intact. There, in the warp of the canvas and in the illusory veins of the artificial wood pressed into rectangular boards, the painter weaves his most recent polychrome yarns, assembling his Structures and Plots.1 There he produces the intersections of the red, blue, yellow or green, brown and black bands that pin together his spaces. There he traces the crossroads of the paths that bring the edges of the painting into contact, carving the tongue and groove of planks turned into beams for the construc- THE MOTIVES OF THE HERMIT. GERARDO DELGADO, CIRCA 2024 JOSÉ JOAQUÍN PARRA BAÑÓN XIII THE REASONS OF THE SOLITARY BIRD Sitting in the hermitage around an Entramado angular [Angular Lattice], watched over by several Escuadras oblicuas [Oblique Set-squares] propped up against the walls, in the presence of Daniel Bilbao, we talked about St John of the Cross. Of what the man from Ávila, the veil-weaving infant dressed as a Carmelite, postulated in the “Points of Love” of his Spiritual Notices: The traits of the solitary bird are five: first, it seeks the highest place; second, it withstands no company, not even of its own kind; third, it holds its beak in the air; fourth, it has no definite colour; fifth, it sings sweetly. These traits must be possessed by the contemplative soul. It must rise above passing things, paying no more heed to them than if they did not exist. It must likewise be so fond of silence and solitude that it does not tolerate the company of another creature. It must hold its beak in the air of the Holy Spirit, responding to his inspirations, that by so doing it may become worthy of his company. It must have no definite colour, desiring to do nothing definite other than the will of God. It must sing sweetly in the contemplation and love of its Bridegroom. The solitary bird, said Juan de Yepes Álvarez before Benedict XIII propelled him definitively to the altars as St John of the Cross, has no particular colour: it is of any colour because in it are contained all the colours, both possible and imaginable. The solitary bird, the Commentator suspects, is the compendium of colour. Colour is a solitary bird that unites five virtues that are not theological. The contemplative soul, adds the convent-founding poet, does not have to have a certain colour. The solitary soul withstands no companionship: it suffers no pain when it dispenses with the company of creatures who express themselves stridently. In Gerardo Delgado’s linear structures, the mysticism, the workmanship of the transparent sashes and the spirit of provocative trigonometry are all perceptible. The cages without doors are recognisable in them, the open aviaries that imitate the nests that out there, in the treetops, far from the eaves, are rounded with small branches, candy wrappers and skeins of braided woollen yarn. XIV ALL KINDS OF MELANCHOLY “I have experienced all kinds of foolish melancholy – I’ve been homesick for countries I’ve never seen, and longed to be what I couldn’t be – but all those moods were trivial compared to my premonition of death,” writes John Cheever at the beginning of one of the middle paragraphs of the short story “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”. The same story concludes: “In the dim night light that came in at 117 tion of coffered ceilings without background and without symmetry. And there and thereabouts, going up and down from one workspace to another – his second, more intimate studio, contained in the domestic nave that runs along the other side, converging with the first – he composed the collages done in cut-out cardboard that are preserved at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (Estructura modular variable [Variable Modular Structure], 1971), modelled the sculptural pieces that are featured in his provisional inventory (Estructura móvil, Juguete modular para Conchita [Moving Structure, Modular Toy for Conchita]) and devised – according to Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Silva – alternative posters for local fairs at the beginning of his career. There, in the bosom of the whale beached in the olive grove at the top of the hillock, he wrote his synthetic texts, ordered the photographs that he took of the world one faraway day – and which he once exhibited – and architecturally laid out the dozens of catalogues produced for institutional commissions, among whose covers Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, Richard Deacon, Enzo Cucchi, David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Francisco Zurbarán wander hand in hand like brothers. There, accompanied by Morton Feldman, he has recorded the traces of the jet fumes of a hundred aerobatic aircraft crossing the air. Trails of myriads of motorboats ploughing the water in all directions after Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, or his heirs, had poured into the Venetian lagoon the dyes that the Granada-born artist kept in the Martinego palace. It is there that the Painter engenders lines and gives birth to triangles and other irregular polygons, strokes of constant width that are nailed to one another, giving rise to sharp shapes as they furrow the variegated universes still in formation that Gerardo Delgado imagines, to which he gives consistency by drawing them, painting them as if it were the first day of creation. 116 1 For a few hours on 23.11.23 the exhibition at the CAC in Málaga was entitled, due to a suggestive orthotypographical misunderstanding, E(x)tructuras y tramas [Xtructures and Plots]: the vindication of intersections, the praise of the geometric ‘x’, the defence of crossings, the invocation of incisive angles and the veneration of the line that bifurcates and trifurcates was thus made clear from the threshold. But the chiasma was replaced by the serpent, the fracture by the smooth continuity of the ‘s’, the cross by the profile of the aphrodisiac hip, and the illegal structure was subjected to the legitimate structure. 2 The works by Gerardo Delgado included in The Motives of the Hermit were photographed by the writer in the artist’s studio and correspond to different moments and phases in the process of construction of the pieces. They are therefore decontextualised fragments that have been intervened and altered – as the tone of their colour palette has also been transformed – to adapt them to the text they silently accompany anced like those of the temples that Giulio Romano tells us were brought down by the giants in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, intertwining their shafts before breaking, the germs of the latest Gerardodelgadan compositions would be found. The crisscrossing of his apocryphal rods also comes from the virgin annunciations: from those Gothic ones in which Mary of Nazareth, who remains seated or who stands up in surprise at the archangel Gabriel’s intrusion into her private space, crosses her arms over her breast, it is not clear whether as a sign of acceptance of her pregnancy or as a defensive gesture, whether of constriction or of sudden rejection of the dramatic news transmitted to her by the unwelcome messenger. The nubile arms painted by Fra Angelico around 1425, or by Murillo around 1660, from among those in the Museo del Prado, or by Alejo Fernández in between (Annunciation, ca. 1508. Oil on panel, 72 × 49.5 cm) in that superb room which, marginalised by critics, hangs in room II of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville, in which a porphyry and gold column governs the possessed space. Although from the angelic, Gothic and Renaissance annunciations, what Gerardo Delgado rescues is not so much the crossed arms as the phylacteries on which the words that are pronounced are printed. The phylacteries entangling themselves in each other: copulating with each other, subtle, mute, overcoming modesty, interpenetrating each other as they caress each other. XVI TITIAN IN RICHTER Gerhard Richter wanted to own an Annunciation by Tiziano Vecellio: given the impossibility of obtaining it, as an alternative, in 1973 he decided to have a copy made from a photograph. From a postcard. From the Annunciation that the evangelical interpreter painted around 1539 in oil on a canvas measuring 166 × 266 centimetres, which still hangs in the Scuola Grande of the Arciconfraternitá di San Rocco in Venice. But he was unable to reproduce it. He tried four or six times: five attempts, five stations in an analytical process that remained unfinished. In the first, the canvases looked alike; they were almost identical, hence the failure, because the aim was not the mimetic reproduction of the appearance but the extraction of the essence: the decantation of sensations. Until he had exhausted Titian’s version by taking it back to its origin, to the set of sensations materialised in stains from which the Venetian started, the German did not stop. Agony is the word that defines this movement back to the beginning, to the gene, to the substance from which the multitude supplied by the others is generated. There are, leaning on the floor and propped up against the walls, packed in cardboard, protected by bubbling plastics, placed alongside each other in the Painter’s studio, annunciations and crucifixions, nativities and descents, escapes to Egypt and martyrdoms, meninas and landscapes 119 the windows, the house looked like a shell, a nautilus, shaped to contain itself”. This Commentator does not know what the foolish kinds of melancholy are, and what – to use the terms interchangeably – the foolish melancholies might be, though he may have experienced some of them. Neither does he know whether the Painter has experienced any of these benefactors, or all the injurious ones, or none of them: nor even whether or not these states seem trivial to him compared with the dispensable premonition of death. But what he is absolutely certain of is that the Painter’s studio, to which his house adheres like a chalky, hollow protrusion, like a necessary prosthesis connected by a hiatus that never closes, is an entity created to contain its own form or – to alter the order of the factors once again – a form created to contain its own entity. Like the labyrinth for the monster (according to Apollodorus), or the monster for the labyrinth (according to Borges), one is made for the other: created by the other. It should be remembered that Gerardo Delgado is an architect by training and an occasional essayist. At the back of the studio, in the library area where the books await their turn to be arranged on their respective shelves, the orphaned page of an old newspaper ages, showing, in full colour and half size, a reproduction of Artemisia Gentileschi’s superb Lucretia, who – dagger held high just before her suicide – illustrates an article in the cultural section of the newspaper. Spread out, the sheet of paper preserves from the atmospheric dust that swirls in the summer heat the corner of a copy of El oído melancólico [The Melancholy Ear] and part of another of Arquitectura de la melancolía [Architecture of Melancholy]. One of them holds a bookmark, protruding from the chapter in which the creative processes related to accidie are dismembered. Nearby is a catalogue containing a Gerardodelgadomachy subtitled Sermón de las once palabras [The Sermon of the Eleven Words], written in 2020, of which the excursus Gerardo Delgado, circa 2021. The Traits of the Solitary Bird, is a continuation. XV ANNUNCIATIONS AND SURRENDERS If the rigorous grids of the fourteen pieces that determine the Ruta de San Mateo [St Matthew’s Way] – held at the CAAC – were to be disarranged; if the crosswords that originated those very orderly arrangements of reiterative dissimilar pieces were to be distorted; if the twenty-nine erect lances (thirty if the incomplete one is added) of Diego Velázquez in The Surrender of Breda were to fall to the right and left, intermingling with each other; if the trees of the forests planted or defended with poles and sticks by Joseph Beuys, or the beechwoods intervened by Agustín Ibarrola, were to bend over; if the columns were to collapse, unbal- 118 battlements” about whom Blanca Andreu wrote in one of her foundational poems, the one that went on to say: “death will come among melancholic palimpsests that were once poetry”. XVIII BLOOD WEDDING The architect Gerardo Delgado, a graduate of the University of Seville, designed his Residence on Earth not on Pablo Neruda’s peaceful black Island but on the outskirts of Olivares. He conceived it on the basis of the family home and the adjoining bay: his home and his workshop are the result of renovation, rehabilitation and restoration of forms and memory. The omnipresence of the beams of the four cable-stayed skirts of the studio roof in his canvases, of the supporting structure of the inherited chapel roof – with its elementary trusses simulating a blind, perpetually opaque sky – is not accidental, although perhaps the Painter is not fully aware of its persistence in recent productions. It may just be an obsession of the Commentator, who from the very beginning was stubbornly insistent on seeing, in the long-lived rectangles of Gerardo Delgado, beams, joists, corbels, brackets, lintels, linear systems, stylistic elements, or lattices, pergolas, vine tunnels bent by Cartesian geometry, bristling with millimetric rules, trellises and sheds pierced by the hail of storms, disjointed by the downpours and blizzards that bore their holes in dreams. Roofs ruined by time and neglect, like those of the torrid farmhouses of Campos de Níjar, which build sharp shadows during the day, twinkle with twilight in the afternoons and filter Scandinavian and Turkish stars at night, to entertain the lizards and spectres of Blood Wedding with the spectacle of their metamorphoses. And to offer repertoires to Jannis Kounellis and plots to the series and the gerardodelgadan variations. Nijareño farmhouses on the verge of extinction or, as the Painter lamented on 9 August 2023 at five o’clock in the afternoon, as we travelled along the road from Sanlúcar la Mayor to Olivares, the Aljarafeño haciendas, now collapsed by neglect and despondency, where as a child, before they were lightened by the hollows of the cancerous roofs, I was invited to spend idle hours, to chase mirages and flashes of light spun by the orange groves of the atavistic orchards, now cut down and replaced by the barren emptiness of the dry land. The road, now deprived of the prickly pears that use to line it with green ovals and lilac ellipsoids, their mauve tinged with bloody purple. XIX TO JIGGLE, TO SHAKE, TO MARTYR If he shakes a Portuguese book by António Lobo Antunes (Treatise on the Passions of the Heart, 121 without sunflowers, great glasses and single San Sebastians descending stairs to the rhythm of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas, to the beat of the light that dissolves the clouds and stables them in polygons of elementary colours (which Delgado calls Escuadras oblicuas [Oblique Set-squares]). The category in which the catalogue raisonné of Richter’s work includes his annunciations is “Photographic Painting”, although it also links them to the “Indeterminate Painting” section. The catalogue raisonné of Gerardo Delgado’s complete works will require the invention of other polyphonic and profane categories. In any case, it will require renouncing the usual ones: geometric abstraction and abstract geometry, Suprematism and Neoplasticism, Josef Albers and Elena Asins. XVII METAPHOR OF THE POLYDRUG-DEPENDENT SPOON What connections can be made between Tintoretto and Gerardo Delgado, and what do his diagonals have to do with the diagonals that run along the floor and walls in The Removal of the Body of Saint Mark (1662-66. Gallerie dell’Accademia)? What connections with the body plummeting from the sky in The Miracle of the Slave (1662-66. Gallerie dell’Accademia), and what with the cornices in perspective in Discovery of the Body of Saint Mark (1662-66. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan). The philosophical dictum tells us that nothing is the same as anything else, but this primitive certainty – contrary to the opinion of certain Anglo-Saxon writers – does not disqualify metaphors that propose correspondences: dazzling shifts of meaning between disparate signs. Titian is nothing like Michelangelo, nor Picasso like Caravaggio. Absolutely nothing? Nothing at all if one compares the appearance of their works, or if the comparison is made at different times of the day, or at different temperatures. Similarities are not objective, they do not belong to the realm of science, but to the nebulous realm of speculative literature. The Commentator is not referring to the comparison of what is superfluous in things – to the confrontation of the identity of the crust and the mask – but to the microscopic search for common chromosomes. Titian ended up despising brushes and drawing with his fingers. Yet not everyone has time to reach this final stage of wisdom, to discover the bristles, the hair that – if he perseveres – eventually grows on the fingertips of the good painter. Gerardo Delgado uses spoons as thimbles. A metal spoon with which he adheres the Tesa tape to the canvas, pressing it on the convex side. A soup spoon which, seen for the first time sailing adrift in the swell of the surface of the painting, seems to the spectator to be a utensil from the primary trousseau of the drug addict: of the “Polydrug-dependent addicted to the laudanum of sleep and not to the highest 120 “For a long time music was played with those stone instruments that were the naves of the churches – submerged in the gloom – of the Romanesque world, and then with the immense and more luminous avenues of the cathedrals of the Gothic world”, says Pascal Quignard in L’amour, la mer [Love, the Sea], section five (Music and Death), chapter three (Lives of Musicians). Not with lutes and theorbos, harpsichords or organs, but with the musical boxes that the inorganic cavities of sonorous architecture are. “Churches replaced the ancient caverns as sounding boards for an increasingly unheard beauty”, adds the French writer a page further on. Gerardo Delgado paints in a cavern, in a stranded and opaque nave with a single trinitarian window facing the street, a web that is usually closed to the light of day, which is forbidden by the shutters and by the blinds that unfold behind the fluted, spiral grilles. Inside this thorax, the chords of Johann Sebastian Bach and those of Astrud Gilberto resound, intermingling with those of Chet Baker or Pierre Boulez while they wait for those of Erik Satie to conclude. He accumulates horizontally, in unstable columns, hundreds of CDs in disarray in the ark’s cellar and, catalogued and furnished, in the little blue room on the first floor. These musical scores could well be ditches and wrinkles, or plough furrows and ridges, or venous capillaries and frayed nerves. These Structures and Plots could equate with Still Lifes. XXI TOWPATHS, GARLANDS A few strips of material are raised when the Painter fans the wet pigments, just spread out, with a piece of cardboard taken from a box, so that they dry as soon as possible, or when the sticking plasters wake up at night and rise restlessly, like hungry cobras in expectation, to ask voiceless questions to the souls in pain who gather there at night to check the evolution of the painting that Gerardo Delgado furtively executes during that period. Parasitic tapeworms. Ebony tapeworms, the sections of adhesive tape that prevent the liquid paints from overflowing their riverbeds. Tapeworms ironed in pairs, parallel, delimiting, tracing the banks of the red or the blue, the towpaths of the yellow rivers. Swirling tapeworms when they incubate atrocities in the baskets, in the chests and basins, in the buckets that the taxidermist arranges, like sinks, under the table. If a steamroller were to crush them as if they were swirling shavings on the floor of a carpentry shop, it would make a carpet of polychrome ringlets: a sunset of festive garlands among clouds in the Aljarafe. Garlands. Algae suspended from a lumpy mist floating seven metres above the face of the earth. Sargasso weeds whose fluctuations are watched by squid from the bottom of the sea, by flatfish with strabismic eyes on the surface where they have no mouths. Pine needles, intertwined branches of 123 Knowledge of Hell or The Return of the Caravels), the Commentator knows what will fall out of its pages when he lashes it with the fire-whipping mat, when he shakes it, harvesting from it polished words, strung together in breathless sentences, of a perfection unheard of for their Portuguese centipede length. Only Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio and Lobo Antunes, each on one side of the border, know how to string together a thousand and one words without them losing their tension, without losing heart when not finding the verbs in the expected position, without suffocating from the absence of full stops, from the overwhelming accumulation of respiratory commas. He also senses what will come out of Gerardo Delgado’s canvases when he turns them upside down, when he shakes them as if threshing the branches of an olive tree, as they lie on the ceiling, with the stretcher bars revealing their venereal secrets to the ceiling and to the xylophagous insects. School rulers, strips of wood that serve as rods, fourcoloured boards, detached panes of glass evicted by zenithal stained windows made of polycarbonate tinted with acrylics. Gerardo Delgado also links, just as the good writer brings his syntactic structures closer together, the red strips of one canvas with the crimson ribbons of another and with the red bandages of the first, and with the cardinal lines of the one leaning against the wall on the right, waiting for the painter to come and sign it on the back, after drawing a serial number for the private catalogue that one day some meticulous researcher will study. The arrows that protrude from the paintings of Gerardo Delgado, who signed his theoretical writings with the pseudonym Sebastián Olivares because he was born on the same day on which Christianity celebrates, to the delight of Andrea Mantegna and Guido Reni, the feast of the martyr Saint Sebastian – pierced, while tied to the tree or to the column, by converging arrows from disparate origins – will also fall – now ripe, the tips of their stems separated – from the fruit tree. Perhaps Saint Sebastian is to blame for his chiasms, for his mistaken, superimposed, threaded rods. For all his transfixions. Given their colour, these gerardodelgadan arrows are actually bullfighting banderillas. XX SOUNDING BOARD Crazed pentagrams, with lines disordered by a noisy John Cage, by a Merce Cunningham seductively dancing his scores on bundles of reeds: that is what some of Gerardo Delgado’s most recent canvases look like. Barks scratched by creative felines, councils of splinters, covens of shavings, confraternities of metallic nets useful for trawling for underwater monsters, reptilian leviathans, schools of striped manta rays, melodic lines tangled in the sieve of thorny brambles. 122 portional, the former with the sides following the ratio of 1’321 and the latter following that of 1’333. . XXIII GROUNDSWELL A swell that originates in a place other than – and distant from – the one in which it is perceived is called a groundswell. The sea spreads out in waves that flee from the wind that propels them and are pushed forward without being able to resist, continuing to expand epidermally after the wind has calmed down. The groundswell is impelled sound, rippling water: a watery, sinuous and propagative substance. There are those who apply to the canvas, after having prepared it to support other layers, an undercoat: one or two substrates of undercoat. This is done in the manner of a coating, not an overlay or a covering, because it is said that a coat of paint is applied when it is spread so that it covers a surface in its entirety, without leaving a crack. Applying an undercoat involves laying out (as Wolfgang Laib sprinkles hazel-tree pollen on the pavement) a crust of humus, building up a substantial bed of soil (in the same way as the sower scatters manure, seeds and fertilisers in the field) on which the civil work will grow: on the basis of that foundation, the rest of the building will rise or be excavated. Some others who resort to this strategy of stimulation call this germinal matter “background noise”, not “background music”. Whether we call it a coating or we call it noise, substrate or foundation, the background is always partially uncovered, fluctuating, diffuse, lightening in the pond, becoming transparent beneath what Gerardo Delgado superimposes on it. Ophthalmoscopy is concerned with the fundus of the eye: it analyses the structures at the back of the eyeball. In cooking, there are different kinds of what we call stock: slow-cooked broths, tasty, fragrant juices, used as a base for the preparation of various dishes. When the bones are cooked with marrow, vegetables from the garden, aromatic herbs and spices are added to the water: carrots, courgettes, peppers, beetroot, onions, leeks and chives, fennel sprouts, bay leaves, ground cumin, cloves, basil and parsley are recognisable in Gerardo Delgado’s nutritional paintings. Also a good part of the condiments cited by Pablo de Rokha in 1948 in his Epopeya de las bebidas y comidas de Chile [Epopee of the Beverages and Foods of Chile]: “And what do you say to a side of pork with garlic, very spicy, roasted on a maqui spit, in June, next to a peumo, a patagua or a boldo tree – summarising the dramatic atmosphere of rainy evenings in Quirihue or Cauquenes – or to a guañada in goose broth, completely Talquian or Licantenian of kinship?” Are there not three horizontal versions of the map of Chile in the artist’s Estructura triangular número 3 [Triangular Structure Number 3]? 125 trees to which have been applied the prehensile techniques of periodic mammography, the ones they use to scrutinise the chests of those old men whose latex breasts have not ceased to grow in their old age, and which, when ripe, sag like two deflated bladders, like skins of rancid wine that oblivion has left hanging from metal hooks on the sunny slopes, or like the udders of goats evicted by shepherds on inaccessible cliffs. Esparto mats seen under the microscope, each fibre with its respective degree of maturity. Wooden fragments of waste, shutter slats, pencil drawings by Rosemarie Castoro. XXII NEGATIVES, NOTEBOOKS AND PROPORTIONS What is a negative in Gerardo Delgado’s feverish painting? Pages 80 and 81 of his Cuaderno número 4 [Notebook Number 4] suggest an explanation (pages 112 and 113 add further information). What does not appear in them is the reason for painting the + and also the –, not as a photographic process but as a sculptural one. That is to say: substituting full spaces for gaps, solid areas for hollows and transparencies for opacities, in an architectural process in which, from the same stable structure, the orifices that were previously left open are saturated. On Tuesday 1 September, as the upper half of the image shows, the large positive was transformed into the large negative on the odd-numbered page of that notebook with the green covers, where the layout of the box in the first row and second column was changed. From there, the drawing was returned to the previous page, where it mutated, becoming positive again and reducing its size to an eighth of the original. This structure of triangles and trapezoids has not yet been transferred to the canvas. It awaits its turn in the notebook of essays, experiments and calligraphic sketches. Gerardo Delgado draws with a biro in school notebooks sewn with metal springs to take advantage of the light-blue grid printed on the paper. Antigraphic notebooks in which stains cohabit with words. In the transcriptions from the printed grid on paper to the grid drawn in pencil on the board or canvas, the Painter alters the proportions. For example, from a ratio of 1:1’200 to 1:1’321 or – expressed differently – from 1:0’8333 to 1:0’756. That is, he converts 48 units of height into 185 centimetres and 40 units of width into 140 centimetres, so that the original squares are transformed into incipient rectangles. If the drawing contains 4×4 rectangles of 12×10 squares the canvas, however, is subdivided into 4×4 rectangles of 12×10 rectangles. As an architect, from the graphic design to the plastic layout, from the idea to the execution of the work, he adapts the planned foundation to the real conditions of the site. Faithful to the metric, Gerardo Delgado reiterates formats: for the large ones, 185 × 140 centimetres; for the small ones, 120 × 90; almost pro- 124 ment acquires a different tone or colour. The Venetian’s mountains, far removed from the hillocks and knolls that line the Guadalquivir, are undoubtedly the ancestors of the multifaceted pyramids of Sol LeWitt’s Complex Forms series: those razor sharp, sophisticated shapes, like honed iceberg peaks, sculpted in ice by the American. One would have to ask Gerardo if this smiling Sol, with his round glasses of the latter years, appears to him in his sleepless hours and encourages him to continue looking for colour palettes in bazaars and kitchen towels. This Commentator can guess that Gerardo Delgado’s painting is nourished, among other things, by the fountains of abstraction that flow from Domenico Veneziano and Sol LeWitt, both in a fragment of Velázquez (the frame of the large canvas that the Sevillian paints inside Las Meninas) and in the blades of Juan de Roelas’s Martyrdom of Saint Andrew (1610-15. Oil on canvas, 520 × 346 cm. Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville), as well as in the threads of the space that Marcel Duchamp outlined in 1942 in New York for First Papers of Surrealism and in the decomposition, agitation and dislocation of the canvases that Piet Mondrian used to compose before he began to dance in the secret realm of his last New York studio. He also suspects that the artist is animated by a Brazilian spirit similar to the one that inspired – between 1956 and 1958 – the Planes in Modulated Surface, the Modulated Space or the Modulated Surface of Lygia Clark. Or the Meta-schemes and the Spatial Relief of Helio Oiticica, although both hers and his are melted and placed against the light by the Painter: the backlight of realities that have been flayed by his chisel. After all, it is in the firmament that the latest harvest of the Bodega San Joaquín is rooted and nourished: the paintings that are leading Gerardo Delgado on his way towards 2024 are optimistic skies, aerial landscapes devoid of drama, projects of atmospheres of the future, gardens with pergolas and lattices in which existence matures without anguish, paradisiacal places that await the renewed birth of Eve, variegated universes, polychrome milky ways without stars, luminous firmaments of trails outlined with essential pigments. Infant rainbows. 127 XXIV DOMENICO VENEZIANO UNDRESSES The panel on which Domenico Veneziano (c. 1410- 61) painted Saint John in the Desert in tempera around 1445 was part of the altarpiece in the church of Santa Lucia dei Magnoli in Florence. John, the future John the Baptist, is strikingly and completely naked, and his youthful body casts no shadow on the cerulean ground. The souls in hell, Dante Alighieri reported in his Commedia, did not cast shadows either, the dead being differentiated by this phenomenon from the living. His Apollonian nudity is justified because the Florentine painter imagines him at the moment of shedding his previous comfortable, aristocratic clothing, which he now drops at his feet, to replace it with a rough, untanned skin with which, according to tradition, he will henceforth cover himself. He will replace his worldly clothes with a rudimentary, tattered habit of camel’s hair or sheep’s wool. No one had ever before imagined and composed this episode, of which nothing is said in the canonical gospels. No one had given this metaphor its appearance. Nor had anyone drawn this civilian figure, which is sanctified by the addition of the golden halo; nor this scenario in which the conventional desert, harmonised with sandy dunes, is transformed into a rocky, fractured and fissured landscape, where the earth’s aridity stands in opposition to the luxuriance of the bushes and the silky banks of a threadlike Jordan River which imitates the sinuous ditches that fertilise the drylands. The future hermit here still lacks a shelter, a house, a hut or a cave. As in the case of Adam in exile from Paradise, the architecture of clothing precedes that of construction and adaptation to the environment. John’s nakedness corresponds to the radical nakedness of his surroundings: his dispossession is in tune with the desolation of the inclement nature in which he has been abandoned by Domenico. Perfidious, bristly, rugged, the clayish earth breaks up into a broken succession of elongated, angular, crystalline surfaces: a layout of planes tilted by the wind against a sky that darkens to blue as it rises. Gothic mountains, uninhabited horizons, tangles of impenetrable thorns to express the most absolute and radical solitude of man: perhaps the perpetual and inconsolable solitude of the artist at five o’clock in the morning, when the wolves retreat to lick themselves in their dens. Although this sovereign and celibate John of the desert has nothing to do with Gerardo Delgado creating universes in the monasticism of his naval workshop, the rocks carved by a sculptor god prone to multiple folds are – or could be – precedents of some of his canvases full of wedges and splinters: those of the series Estructuras triangulares [Triangular Structures], Entramados angulares [Angular Lattices] or Tramas negras [Black Plots] and Garabatos geométricos [Geometrical Squiggles], where each facet of the crystalline arrange- 126