Xisco Fuentes works are full of references that point to the essential, loaded with humility and precise brush strokes that endow the image with realism, giving them a beauty and brilliant texture that captivates the soul of the viewer.
This is the painting by Xisco Fuentes: a man who loves simplicity, who caresses small details with his brushes and values the everyday life, the sweetness of the scars of the passage of time, the rust of gutters, wrinkles … deterioration of the facades of those manbuilt buildings that today are abandoned and condemned to demolition. He is an artist committed to leaving a testimony of what tends to disappear, honoring with his art the value that the patina of time gives to each object or building.
He is considered a key figure on urban landscapes in Mallorca and he has a special way of seeing the architecture and industrial archeology of the city, to which he dedicated a complete series on the railway, Chinatown and Sa Gerreria, managing to immortalize ordinary moments and places of particular charm. With his work, he recovers the lost Mallorca, those wonderful images of the Island that the mercantile zeal is devouring little by little, as he tells us.
The painter’s versatility and unique sensitivity for the natural and the organic are evident in his exhibitions dedicated to his father’s garden, featuring fruit trees, flowers and insects. Once again, he offers us his intimate vision of the countryside, not as mere land to exploit, but as a space full of life, charm and possibilities.
He has a curious and restless mind, in love with ancient chores such as basketry, fishing, looms, and the little pots that connect us with other times. With his work he gives us a tribute to this world, a showcase full of unique objects, artisans and fishing boats anchored in port.
On various occasions, Xisco has stated that his intention is to make a synthesis of what he wants to paint, eliminating the superfluous and the baroque to show only what is left on the retina: “I do not seek to give it all to the viewer; when the viewer faces a painting he has to get involved and put his mind at work a little to get a complete picture”.
Xisco Fuentes is a painter from town. A town which he has always identified with and which he manages to capture in his work, immersing us, contemplating his portraits in the depths of human essence and making us accomplices of his realities through accurate looks that become mirrors of “what was”.
For Xisco Fuentes it is like the singer-songwriter Victor Jara has said that art “makes sense when it beats in the veins of the one who will die singing the true truths”.
Xisco Fuentes.
Art studio: Carrer d´en Morei, 13.
Palma de Mallorca.
Instagram: @xiscofuentes.art
