From prehistory until the beginning of the XX century, painting’s historical goal was to obtain an image in which perspective and quality characteristics were as close as possible as its reference, thereby giving the artists great responsibility. It was, indeed, a path full of tensions. Inevitably, to my mind comes the images of scenographies of great painters of the Trecento (The scenes of Saint Francesco d’ Assisi’s life by Giotto or the well-known portrait of Guidoriccio d’ Fogliano, piece of Simone Martini). These and other authors have lived in a very special moment of painting history. They were very close to achieve perspective and volume, however they didn’t. The Renaissance was needed for the maturation of painting and therefore the possibility to achieve heights which had never been seen before. It was the time when writers and thinkers started to reflect about the principals and the methods of drawing and painting in thick and large volumes. There is no doubt about how these treaties influenced and popularized the studies and practice of painting in an extraordinary way.

We could call this effort a “meta-pictoric” labor, which would be to think about the act of painting and drawing through the practice itself. And this is the central subject in Gloria Martin’s (Alcalá de Guadaíra, Sevilla, 1980) work, who under the title Modelo y Modo has gathered in Galería silvestre (Madrid) a set of oil paintings of different dimensions, mural paintings and painted-objects in which she investigates the fundaments of painting, such as the labor of the artists (their instruments and daily view). Martin’s work makes reference to important treaties, such as Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum (1642-1709) of Andrea Pozzo or the historical-literature piece El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715-1724) of Antonio Palomino from Córdoba, who wrote about the Trompe-l'œil (“deceive the eye” in French), a visual concept essential for the baroque movement, that intended to fool the eye making people believe that the paintings on the walls presented a third dimension: depth. This constant wink to the artifact, not only leads to a theoretical compendium, but also to machineries and wits that pretended to improve the artist’s work. For example the cube-system created by the German Albrecht Dürer. An interesting exchange in the artistic practice between generations of artists is established capable of overcoming temporal or geographical barriers. Celebrating those who questioned their professional activity and celebrating the fabulous dialog itself in which an artist from the XXI century responds through a pictorial language, fully contemporary, to a theoretical and practical Renaissance and Baroque compendium.

Besides this wink to great thinkers of drawing and painting techniques, Martín cannot abandon the concerns about the ways, formats and the daily view of contemporary artists. Therefore, her work recreates images as a small storage room with paintings stacked in different levels, metallic structures such as a scaffold (essential for mural paintings) or a propelling pencil full of brushes of different forms and materials. Maybe because of this the palette of the painter is the most important piece. It was a canvas that has been used as a martyr board during the pictoric elaboration of the pieces that now compose the exhibition. It speaks to us about the concerns, the obsessions and satisfactions of artists from a synthesis and a definitive essentialization.