REVIEWS 
Alfonso Galván
By Rosa Olivares. Exit Exprés. octubre 2004.
In the ongoing turbulence of the Spanish contemporary art scene, considering the unstable market conditions, and the even more uncertain aesthetic criteria, there are names that have been lost in the shuffle. Some because they have made their fortunes elsewhere in distant shores; others because they have drowned and disappeared forever. Interestingly, some uncannily resurface over the edges of a map that crumples and extends itself randomly.
Alfonso Galván (Madrid, 1945) was under the eye of international curators (those were the days of Rudi Fusch’s Documenta) and of directors of American museums of prestige. With the passing of time, and with it the evolution of Spanish outlooks, such imminent openings did not take place and the artist was left on the lurch due mostly to the luck of the draw exemplified by disappearing galleries.
His comeback to the Madrid art scene is surprising, if in a space that not only lacks an effective viewing area but which also happens to be under the radar. Nevertheless, the work continues to stand on its own, obedient to the premises of a, perhaps, exaggerated coherence. Monsters and dangerous primitive paradises appear in full detail in a deep and mysterious painting, with a sensibility that makes of a leaf, of an insect, a pretext to spill drawings and paint, forgetting tendencies and opinions. He is an artist impossible to categorize, since he does not belong to a period, to any movement. It is not that he distances himself from the current vogue, but rather that for him and his paintings, the animals, the hybrid monsters of a very individual imagination, there is no vogue.
Paradise as seen by a realist.
By Javier Rubio Nomblot. Ubicarte. octubre 2004.
“A season in Eden”, is the title of Gloria Otero’s presentation, allowing her unconscious to betray her (and thus, all of us), since it makes clear that we can call anything Eden as long as it has nothing to do with the world-suit we think we’re wearing (or with yesterday’s monotony, as well as tomorrow’s): although it is infested with dragons and brontosaurus and crocodiles, iguanas and giant frogs; although a centuries-old storm darkens the daylight; although the plateau filled with lava and ash extend all the way to the horizon and each step we take in this gloomy jungle, inextricable and colossal, may be the very last, the world that Alfonso Galván paints continues to be a place that is still not corrupted by the devil. In other words, it is a place without corrupt men; and that is, by definition, paradise (a place, in some way, damned, you might say, since its reason for being is precisely to serve as scenery for the first and definitive fall; but that’s another story). Furthermore, we know that the Garden of the Hesperides is not easy to get to –let’s put that aside in our minds—and that the Edenic one was only accessible to the ingénue, because ferocious beasts and tame ones mingle in harmony, and what is even more amazing, men and women as well (if not for a very long time, according to the legend.)
And that’s how it usually is, but Alfonso Galván (Madrid, 1945) is not a naïf painter; he belongs to that branch of the second generation of realist painters that burst unto the stage in the first years of the seventies to certify what López García and others had been hatching the previous decade. It has to be recalled that in 1970 that distinctive figurative alternative to the informalist torrent of which today proof remains (because the elimination of all the other schools by current art historians bent on exercising political correctness enervate me, I might add) had no name, despite the fact that Antonio López had been bewitching the critics for ten years with that which Santiago Amón, in 1969, denominated “magic realism” (that is, something he still related to the heirs of Klee, perhaps because in the decade of the fifties that’s the category fitting all the Spanish artists, from Tápies to Lucio Muñoz, passing through Feito, Millares and César Manrique). The first time that such a denomination emerges is in the collective of Young Realists celebrated in the Gallery Seiquer, indeed, in 1971, an exhibition in which S. Amón congregated several pupils of the Escuela de San Fernando which seemed to him to be influenced by Antonio López: Alfonso Galván, Cuasante, Clara Gangutia, Quetglas, Mezquita, Portellano, etc. After that, the Documenta 72 group will come, which inaugurates the decade of hiper-realism (American), the exhibition Contemporary Spanish Realists in London’s Marlborough (1973) and all those exhibitions that are now historic and in many of which Galván’s work was represented. But let me finish this arid paragraph, necessary to correct memory’s lapses (and, as one can see, more and more malleable) to say that sometimes convenient to remember that official art and valuable artists not always follow the same path.
The truth is that, seen under this light, Alfonso Galván appears to us, moreover, as a historic case, like a hardy survivor; and there is no doubt that he is: his fidelity to the myth of the eternal recurrence (intoxicating vessel always poisoned), or his interest for the Conan Doylan lost world, has not waned in thirty years, in spite of the fact that his work constitutes a unique endeavor (even though José Hernández could accompany him) and is situated in the margins of the realist current in Spain. In that passion for that which is virginal –see, for example, the great tryptich with nude figures and swans--, the indomitable –splendid drawings on the water, the rock and tree—and the mysterious –that tremendous effigy of a simian more than four meters square—one is apt to find the nest of a wandering romantic spirit; but the work of Alfonso Galván es frequently too hard and perverse, too austere and pessimistic, to separate it from that very current art that nourishes itself from its lost innocence: for some reason, the Jurassic Eden of Alfonso Galván possesses the synthetic texture of the modern even though it is made up of mists, swamps, black swans, storms, and snakes; his work makes sense only in contact, or in contrast with, our own present and so it comes about as a disconcerting group of ancient images and terrifying visions that burst in the exhibition space and perturb the normal flow of things (including the monotone-clonic art). Therefore, these pictures are not, after all, no refuge, no Eden…Of course, what else is Eden, or art, if not myth, fable, yearning, and invention?
Chance and Death. The unsettling world of Alfonso Galván.
M. R. Barnatán, El Mundo, Febrero 1992.
For many years I have been fascinated by the unsettling universe Alfonso Galván has constructed with perseverance since his first appearance in the galleries of Madrid. It is a world in which reputations are made and unraveled overnight and in which so many have succumbed to the deforming winds of change and fashion. To find a painter like Alfonso Galván, an example of coherence and wisdom, is a great satisfaction.
To know how to paint with dignity is something too difficult in a country like Spain, of such a long and varied plastic tradition. But to paint knowing what you want to paint and with ideas about what you want to say and transmit is already something else. And it is in this second category where we should place this artist.
Galván is a strange but fertile conjunction between an excellent painter, who owns his own world free of generational mimetisms, and someone who accomplishes to transport the viewer to a reality with great skill that is disturbing, unsettling.
Like the ancient initiates, Galván seems to be one of those artists to whom nothing has been freely given and to whom the sorcerer’s stone ends up on his table through his own will, that which others also call faith.
A threatening nature in which man lives in a dangerous way with the other beings in the planet is the scenery of a romantic painting of a mysterious and perverse plenitude.
The animals, exempt of any virtuosity and the primordial elements –water, air, earth and fire—seem to evoke a microcosms previous to the Flood, and even previous to the expulsion from the earthly paradise in which they can frolic without coming into collision with the destructive force of man.
There is magic in his impossible landscapes nd there is also a sensation of sacred terror in them. His seas infected with sharks, his ghost islands, his crawling reptiles, are multiplied threats in the midst of Eden. A poetry that is not made with eagerness to please, a poetry that does not conform with description but awakens questions, creates states of mind, and unblocks the dormant imagination of its spectators.
The paintings of this new exhibition in Madrid by Galván are coherent with his previous work and let see how they grow in quality, something one can be grateful nowadays when there is so much carelessness.
The sculpture pieces that complement the exhibition are an open path to the future of this great artist.
