I D E A S...

​What is Figurative Art?

​Figurative art is the representation of the world, real and surreal, regardless of the accuracy and fidelity with which it is done. Subsequently, figurative art can branch into expressionist, impressionist, surreal, realistic, hyperrealistic, etc., but it is not the power of realism. The expression figurative art is usually associated with realism, even with hyperrealism, without taking into account that although these artistic currents are figurative, it is not a necessary condition for many others to be equally so. We all agree that the Christ of Saint John by Salvador Dalí is figurative painting, as well as Las Meninas by Velázquez, La Monalisa by Leonardo and many other works of art. On the other hand, it is more difficult to say that a portrait of Picasso from the 1937s -when he painted Guernica- is figurative because it simply has distorted facial features; it has, as is often heard said, "an eye here and another there", and it seems sufficient argument to throw overboard, and incidentally insults, the unequivocal fact that they are figurative works. On the other hand, it is not said of Modigliani's portraits that they are considered figurative without further discussion despite the fact that the distortions and disproportions are evident, not in Picasso's style but in a stylized style that does not correspond at all with the real fact, much less hyper-realistic. The contamination of language, the confusion of terms due to a cataloging of the different artistic languages, never rigorously carried out in a way that is conclusive and clarifying for the public, has meant that the drawing of a pegasus or a minotaur is not considered figurative for many for the mere fact that they do not exist but are the product of fantasy. And here is the crux, fantasy can be figurative, an army of giant ants armed with assault weapons attacking a battalion of living zombies that walk levitating on an invisible platform would be figurative art since it is representing a hypothetical reality, although the ants, to finishing entangling it, they were cubists and with their eyes set here or there.

What is not figurative is abstraction. Here there is no doubt. Not minimalism, neither are the installations for the most part, nor are Christo's performances when he covers an entire island with a pink cloth.

The mistake can come from the same word used, figure, from which figuration, figurativism, figurative derive. The word figure already implies by historical inertia a classical or neoclassical figure and from there, maintained over time and by abuse of language, to apply the term exclusively to an exact representation of something we know, a face, a tree, a sea, a house, a dog, and all of them as we think they are, as a photograph tells us they are. On the other hand, reality is much more complex than this reductionism and even in Velazquez's Los Borrachos the figure that takes off his hat in the upper right corner of the painting barely has his features outlined, but our brain through pareidolia ends up reconstructing it, generating an illusion of reality, a receding into the background and a depth, which are very real despite being based on almost nothing. Velázquez was a genius in many things and in this he already demonstrated his ability to sacrifice detail in pursuit of depth, aerial perspective, hair texture effects, silk, wood... sacrificing details and canons. On the other hand, the error persists even today that the detail, always the detail, gives value to the work, and by extension the proportions, derived mostly from the classical canons that are not reality at all, but an idealization of it. No one can deny that a well-done extreme caricature where the eyes are two points and the mouth a simple script leads us to recompose the true face of someone very real; it is as true a way of expressing a figure as the inert descriptive act of enumerating its details to the point of obsession. It's not that the latter is bad, it's just not exclusive. Figuration, figurative art, is a vast universe of realities that only asks for one thing, to be recognizable as possible. © José Manuel Merello