Angel Alonso Original Signed Lithograph Abstract Art Spain Art

  

Original lithograph signed at the bottom right. Numbered out of 100 copies. Size 69 x 51 cm. Angel Alonso is a painter.

French, of Spanish origin, born on. His work revolves around a reflection on color and material. He remained away from the art market for nearly 20 years, aiming to preserve the integrity of his work. He is the father of Stephanie Alonso and Thierry Alonso, a printmaker. Early years: The escape from Francoist Spain and settling in France. After a few years of self-training, Alonso left Spain. Indeed, between 1938 and 1939, Angel Alonso was arrested at just 17 years old, imprisoned, and sentenced to death after the capture of Bilbao by the Francoists. His family filed for clemency, which was granted due to his young age.

He returned home but a few months later was arrested again for desertion, having not completed his military service. He was then deported to the island of Fuerteventura.

He escaped, then, after a period of hiding, reached the French border in 1947. He then permanently left Spain to join Paris. And especially Nicolas de Staël. The latter often found themselves in their respective works. Guy Dumur in Nicolas de Staël, the fight with the angel, mentions: “He [de Staël] associates with well-known people. Georges Braque, first, whom he sees regularly, André Lanskoy, already mentioned, a young Spanish painter, Angel Alonso. In addition to these early pictorial influences, he feels drawn to color and collage. In 1950, he faced the threat of extradition to Francoist Spain by the French authorities. A support committee was organized, consisting among others of Michel Leiris. He would not obtain French nationality until 1971, thanks to the support of his father-in-law, Roger Rigaud, former vice-president of the Paris Council. In 1952, Alonso refused to exhibit at the prestigious Jeanne Bûcher gallery out of “modesty.” Indeed, he believed his young age did not allow him to claim such an exhibition. In 1955, he exhibited at the André Schoëller gallery, which at that time represented artists such as Rebeyrolle, Fautrier, Messagier, Duvillier, Gnoli, Arroyo. From this exhibition, his materials became denser.

From 1957-58, he painted a series of canvases inspired by Turner’s painting The Burial at Sea of Sir David Wilkie. These were the years of his fraternal meeting with Maria Zambrano, the same person who would introduce him to Cioran. The latter described Alonso in 1987 as the “last French painter.” In light of these encounters, Alonso began his own path. In 1952, he settled in Genainvillier, near Chartres, which from that moment became his place of reflection and research, primarily focused on color.

In 1958, he worked with leaves, apples, trunks, and branches, obsessed with the multiple aspects of plant sensations. He talked a lot with Tal-Coat, who also constantly experimented. In 1956, after living in Paris, at 49 rue de Rennes, Angel Alonso moved to La Laurencie, the family property of his wife Monique Rigaud, in Limousin.

They welcomed many of their friends there, including poets Yves de Bayser and Suzane Tézenas, a famous patron, and the writer and critic Guy Dumur. It was there that Alonso began to deepen his work on material and landscape. The 60s-70s: The bravado in the art market and the assertion of an unprecedented pictorial language. From 1960 and for more than twenty years, Alonso distanced himself from the art market. He devoted himself to painting as a spiritual requirement, always in contact with the earth and nature.

These were intense years marked by a gradual return to the essential, which was reflected especially in color and materials. He began the series of large black paintings composed of charcoal powder, burnt plants, straw, foliage, and earth, which gives the painting a unique consistency and intensity. Simultaneously, he created other works on wood, cardboard, or paper, where he continued his research and reflection on color.

One early morning, almost at dawn, Alonso was awakened by the smell of smoke from the burned fields. He went to the gate of the farm of La Chapelle and saw that the fire was advancing towards the house. At first, he was frightened, but realizing it was just fieldwork, he stayed to enjoy the spectacle.

When the fire went out, it was the absolute vision: the black earth, like a carpet; he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.” he thought, and he began to walk through the blackened fields, gathering burnt grass and charcoal. He took bags and filled them with ashes without touching them.

The shapes, the vegetal skeleton, remained intact; the fire destroyed the bodies without decomposing their silhouette. That is how it all began for Alonso. This was the initial period, around 1963, of the large charcoals and the vast spaces of mud or burnt earth, where all the possibilities of the color black shine, vibrate, from dry to wet, from the brightest to the densest darkness. The unique source of inspiration for Angel Alonso has always been the landscape.

It was at the center of the daily discussions that united the young painter with Pierre Tal Coat, his friend, his spiritual father. They walked many times through the majestic Lions forest, stopping every fifteen minutes to draw and exchange their views on how to see a landscape.

Since Tal Coat's death, Alonso's sensitive universe has focused on the vast fields surrounding his home in Genainvilliers in Eure. For Alonso, the earth is the most beautiful of landscapes. He even came to work with the earth itself. Echoing these earth surfaces, color must be an expanse; color is landscape.

One can understand why Alonso rejects any artifice aimed at creating depth, refuses any tonal gradation. He seeks color as it is and not as it appears to us, a color of such truth that it transcends the strict limits of the frame. The 80s: The elaboration of a definitive work.

From the 1980s, he exhibited works at the H-M Gallery (185 boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris), which already regularly presented Pierre Tal-Coat. In 1982, he returned to Paris, to Tal-Coat's former studio, which the latter made available to him. He would alternate for a long time between stays in Genainvilliers and rue Brézin. That year, he exhibited at the Cahiers d'Art gallery. In these works, color constitutes the very landscape. With an exceptional mastery of materials, he does not hesitate to invent his reds, greens, yellows, oranges... that burst from the porous surface of his paintings. Between 1986 and 1989, he held several exhibitions at the Galerie Barbier.

The reds, whites, and yellows spread across the canvas, marked by interruptions of space, pushing color to the very extremes of the painting. In these works, he set aside the good relationships and influences of his friend Tal-Coat, as well as the path opened by Matisse.

He opted for a more radical requirement that subordinates his pictorial language to an essential writing in which material and color unite definitively. “He masters the material and the technique he has equipped himself with, through which he succeeds in giving body to the colors that obsess him the most. In the application of color, Alonso plays with the hardness and texture of the material; he introduces elements that reference the landscape of Genainvilliers, the work of farmers, or the gesture of the artist fixing color on the canvas. Hence, sometimes he leaves the spatula or the small piece of wood he used to spread the color on the canvas.

In 1987, Juan Carlos Marset, an intellectual and Spanish academic close to Maria Zambrano, met Angel Alonso during his research on the philosopher and realized the capital importance of Alonso's work. A major retrospective was then organized in Spain, where the entirety of Alonso's studio was transported to organize it.

Towards the end of the 80s, Alonso was overwhelmed by serious health issues and was forced to settle permanently on Rue Brézin. In May 89, at Lannec Hospital, he wrote the poem Beauty Corpse. The series Disasters, exhibited in 1992 at the Sapone Gallery in Nice, constitutes the culmination of his latest research. He once again abandoned his yellows, greens, and earth tones to return to black and white as the last refuge in which he feels secure.

His last paintings, small formats—possible sketches for a time that will never come—complete the journey of his work and his life. The brutal death of Angel Alonso in Paris, on. Transforms the retrospective into a tribute in the form of an exhibition.

It will take place in France, at the Cervantes Institute (Paris, 1996), and in Spain at the Fundacion Marcelino Botin (Santander, August-September 1996), Circulo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, January 1997). In 2009, the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid) purchased a significant number of his works, while the Spanish state received his archives (writings, correspondence, documents), with the prospect of creating a foundation in Santander. In 2013, an exhibition titled Àngel Alonso took place at the Artsenal in Dreux, bringing together the painter's works for the first time in nearly 20 years. 2014: Sept 10 - Nov. 8 Twenty years after the death of Angel Alonso, the Michel Soskine Inc. gallery (Madrid-New York) pays tribute to the artist with the first exhibition in a Madrid gallery of a selection of works, some of which are major.