Throughout his career, Daniel Tamayo has developed an absolutely inimitable language of his own through which he constructs a new identity for the post-industrial Basque landscape.
His fascination with art and painting emerged at the early age of twelve when he visited the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao. He started studying art at the Massana School in Barcelona, where he attended design, drawing and painting lessons, an education he would later further at the School of Fine Arts of Bilbao, where he is currently a teacher.
His work draws from disparate visual sources, ranging from references to his own childhood (clowns, cartoons and comics) to images and elements from everyday life. The combination of all these references taken from his own personal visual archive results in a body of work consisting of highly energetic and colourful paintings, whose elements engage in mutual dialogue within a surrealist and fantastic setting.
From 1985 onwards, his paintings became true stage settings, endowed with a metaphysical dimension that transcends the limits of the purely tangible. Through a combination of geometry and elements grounded in the organic forms of nature, in his works Tamayo recreates a dreamlike atmosphere that invites the beholder to linger on the details.
Worth highlighting in his work is the importance of paper as a medium on which to develop ideas and experiment with a variety of techniques and materials. Besides, working on paper allows him to address the act of painting from a perspective drastically different from the canvas: more intimate and closer to him, transporting him to his early days as an illustrator.
Two periods in which paper played an instrumental role can be clearly differentiated throughout Tamayo’s career: firstly, the so-called pre-watercolourist period (1978-1989), in which he experimented with a large variety of techniques; secondly, the watercolourist period, developed from 1989 to date, totally dominated by watercolours, a medium he combines with glazes to instil his compositions with a greater sense of depth.
Tamayo’s creative process starts with a prior selection of graphic materials from his visual archive, made up of drawings, paper cuttings and photos culled from the most diverse sources. Sometimes, through an operation which the artist calls an iconic safari, he goes out in search of images from the everyday that he then renders with pencil on paper. Once he has selected the images for a work, he draws the composition and then finally applies the colour.
In his pre-watercolourist period we find works like Noche en la mansión de Mr. Huts, from 1983. Despite its small dimensions, this watercolour from the BBVA Collection is an excellent example of Tamayo’s personal visual language. The composition depicts a surrealist scenario which combines figurative characters and elements from reality rendered in totally abstract and unrecognisable shapes that only exist in the world of the imagination, inviting us to contemplate a scene in which each piece has been carefully selected. The meticulousness shown in the treatment of each element and the drawing of the contours evince the painter’s fascination for the refined precise technique of fifteenth-century Italian and Dutch artists.
Noche en la mansión de Mr. Huts pairs the simplification of with elements from popular culture to create a small composition in which, notwithstanding the apparent chaos and restlessness, all the elements are perfectly selected and balanced.
Through this original proposal, which harmoniously merges abstraction and figuration, Daniel Tamayo invites us to reflect on our society today. And he does so with a small watercolour that boasts the very same visual power palpable in his large-format paintings.