Abraham Lacalle: El verdor terrible

“The attack at Ypres was overseen by the father of this new method of war, the Jewish chemist Fritz Haber [...]. Haber was declared a war criminal by the Allies, though they were no less keen in their use of gas than the Central Powers. He was forced to flee to Germany, and he took up residence in Switzerland, where he received notice that he had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for a discovery he had made not long before the war, one that would alter the destiny of the human race in the coming decades [...]. He confessed that he felt an unbearable guilt; not for the part he had played, directly or indirectly, in the death of untold human beings, but because his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium of the planet that he feared the world’s future belonged not to mankind but to plants, as all that was needed was a drop in population to pre modern levels for just a few decades to allow them to grow without limit, taking advantage of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out accross the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.” 

Labatout, Benjamín (2020). When we cease to understand the world (Un verdor terrible). Anagrama 

These watercolors for the exhibition El verdor terrible at VETA by Fer Francés gallery don’t tell a story of its own. What is at stake here is the relationship between colors, the relationship of the colors with the vegetation shapes and the relationship of the latter with the rocks. The content is framed into the point of view: up, down, far, close. This argumentative concision is made with watercolor, a medium that allows immediacy in the execution and the drift that entails correcting mistakes while developing the work. It is difficult to correct and that’s the interesting thing about it. 

I could think of each watercolor as a chapter or an aspect of what the exhibition title means. They are like lightnings illuminating in the dark the same spot. There’s no place for correction. 

The colors always have a meaning, but it makes no sense to speak about the meaning of each of them as they depend on the color to which they are linked to. Once they are left on their own, they start a journey of autonomy in which they are constantly mutating. They are alive and loose.  

Until now one could always discover a hint of human track in my landscapes. El verdor terrible is still the title of a series of landscapes but with a small difference. In these works that human track that I have addressed in the past, is now imperceptible. 

As I have mentioned, as a landscapist, I tackle the themes that concern me or interest me in a tangential manner. It is a whole journey that only touches the mass of the content in one single point. All the work has been elaborated for this imperceptible moment of contact. I won’t speak about content. 

With the artworks in this exhibition, it’s like I am mapping the idea. Flashes of the idea in different moments. Times for electric storm. 

Abraham Lacalle