Cortés

The desire of the human being to contemplate oneself, present oneself, to know oneself or define oneself through the interpretation of their own image has made the portrait one of the most long-standing genres in art history. Thus, the portrait has almost become a good way of getting close to a certain period, a certain place, a certain social group, a certain sensitivity.

This is the case of the portraits by Hernán Cortés, undoubtedly his most famous work, where we can contemplate a parallel record of Spanish life (and not only Spanish) of the latest decades. Some of the characters painted by Cortés have occupied key positions in the cultural, political, economic or social life of the country, but many others, whose names or faces are unknown to the general public, are equally revealing due to the way they are presented to the viewer, the objects around them – or the absence thereof- and also due to the way they are situated and adapted to the canvas. In all of them, portrayed and portraitist identify themselves and amalgamate in the canvases that are now on display.

The way of understanding the portraits of Hernán Cortés is linked to his surroundings, to the contemporary world he lives in, a world that is extremely sensitive to cultural manifestations. At the same time they display another connection: one with a very personal view that is marked by the experience of a certain place, or rather by the visual impact of this experience: I am referring to the Bay of Cádiz, which determines a strong sense of spatial structure in the painting style of Cortés. This is something that is also combined and strengthen with a profound knowledge of contemporary abstraction that finds its roots in the art of the past.

Cádiz has a great influence on him. His images of the Bay of Cádiz speak of something lived, of an individual experience, of a scene of memories. But they also speak a universal language in terms of visual crystallisation of a superior order based on geometry.

On large canvases or on small notes on paper, the Bay of Cádiz, its breakwaters or its seafront, appear as a visual representation of a certain place where formal features, the immense space, the horizon countered by the vertical lines of the cranes, the traffic signs, the palm trees, condition and strike up the pictorial image of the portrait that Cortés has cultivated over several decades, and which is intensely marked by two key concepts: the void and the geometry, almost always orthogonal.

Vertical lines as a constructive element have been, in fact, another one of the formal concerns of Cortés, who studied them in different images dedicated to the Columbus towers or to musical wind instruments placed upright on a surface. They are, in a certain way, a continuation of his study on posts, palm trees, street lights, traffic signs, etc., the vertical lines that compensate the dominant horizon of the Bay of Cádiz, which Cortés notes in a long series of watercolours from the eighties that is shown as a sort of basso continuo throughout his career.