Alfredo Montaña (Oviedo, Asturias, 1945)
Human topics: social gatherings, encounters, unions and solitudes or unions of solitudes represented with an unmistaken style, in which forms blend with geometry and color, lost in a place where reality steps aside, leaving space for the powerful scream of life. Montaña’s work is a symphony of sad or thoughtful, defiant or understanding characters, of sensual and desirous women, of musicians lost in jazz, of seductive dancers, idealists and scoundrels… the nuances of humanity are expressed in a mosaic of narrations guiding us through a world made of silent music and literature in which musical notes and words are transfigured into light.
Montaña is jazz, is creative freedom, in his paintings is clearly manifest the same “trance” of the musician improvising during a jam session. The artist can be assimilated to a trumpet or bass player in a jazz concert. There’s no imposition in what he does, no project, or at least the project doesn’t show, because what shows through is the feverish activity during which the artist frees himself of what is, to enter what has no limits. A sort of meditation, a sort of discipline in search of Nirvana. And the Nirvana is found in the creative act, moment in which the artist has emptied himself of the being leaving space to not being, that is, to the purest expression of the soul. From this ritual he comes out each time renewed, as can be read in his paintings. That’s what Montaña tells us: we must renew ourselves. And renewing ourselves makes us better persons. Likewise, the “myth of the eternal return” can be seen in the works of Montaña, the creation (or evocation) of chaos, to achieve a new order. Which wouldn’t exist without chaos.
Claudio Fiorentini
