Pep Admetlla’s Dark Paintings

There exist images which, the moment they hit the retina, seem to split in two and follow two relatively separate pathways through the labyrinth of the brain. One of them activates neurones sensitive to the beauty of shapes, the coherence of strokes, the unstable balance of masses, relations and contrasts, the surprise of some areas of colour which appear to colonise, like weeds, platonically pure shapes. The second pathway runs along other cerebral tracks and activates remote regions of the brain, reminding you of shards of dreams, obscure worlds, words you have on the tip of your tongue but can never remember. In a few, almost miraculous, cases the two separate pathways resonate with each other and both beauty and mystery make qualitative leaps and increase in potency. The shock jolts a rush of endorphins, flooding the arteries of the unsuspecting viewer. It is the wing-tips of beauty brushing against fearful chaos, sending certain, unlocatable organs in the body into a flutter.

In this exceptional case, the artist plunges us into an uneasy silence, seemingly inviting us to venture into – we may have already entered – the dark kingdom of the mentally disturbed, or perhaps to “return to the shadowy echo chamber that is the past”, or the madness of infancy in the face of the vastness of the world. We feel that something is about to show itself. We experience the epiphany of great knowledge, the immediacy of a vital secret about to be revealed, the manifestation of powers found in superhuman creatures. The catastrophe which, as Friedrich Schelling put it, is that which has to be kept hidden and when revealed, struggles to emerge dangerously from the shadows. But then it dissipates like a dream in the morning light. Leaving an irregular crack etched into the brain. Sooner or later we go back to the figures which jolted a cluster of neurones, and we remember them with a shudder.

These are more or less my experiences when approaching Pep Admetlla’s shadowy paintings. Beauty tempting the terrifying. Threatening faces and equally threatening geometric purity. Perfect, yet ominous, architectural bodies. Broad regions of boundless drawing filled with darkness in which an accumulation of figures can be discerned, except for that of innocence. And the artist’s impeccable and mature use of technique, making his nightmarish images even less forgiving, threaten to make them explicit and show an abominable face that would be better hidden.

The experience of art which abandoned modernity fifty years ago and sails seas that often seem to have been painted by a child forces us to ask ourselves a host of questions about the futility of painting in the 21st century. Despite Marcel Duchamp declaring painting dead decades, not to say a century, ago, Pep Admetlla, like other total artists, makes us realise that bold drawing based on a high degree of technical competence and, especially, on the strange gaze of an artist who does not look up to the zenith of the heavens but down into the depths of entrails, lives on in rude health and still has the power to shock and leave a mark.