Throughout his career Carmelo Ortiz de Elgea has led a true renewal of landscape painting in the Basque Country.
He developed his passion for art as a child, and at the age of just eleven years old he began his training at the School of Arts and Crafts of Vitoria. After that early period of learning he moved to Madrid, where he became acquainted with the avant-garde movements of the time. His experiences in those years left a definitive mark both in his life and in his practice, which gradually evolved towards a highly personal abstract language that takes nature as a permanent source of inspiration. The Basque Country, which Ortiz de Elgea reinterprets in a highly personal manner, plays a critical role in his works.
His creative process is based on a direct dialogue with the canvas, with no intermediary sketches. The artist conceived the act of creation as an automatic process where creative freedom prevails and in which, rooted in nature, the painting itself is what guides him.
In the 1960s his practice evolved from still figurative landscapes towards more matter-based and informel works that herald the shift his painting would undergo in the 1980s. In the late-1960s and the first half of the seventies, his work assimilated certain elements of aesthetics, incorporating the human being into the compositions but with nature always playing a leading role. In that period, his paintings displayed a vibrant and powerful palette irradiating intense energy.
This silkscreen from 1972 belonging to the BBVA Collection is a good example of his work in that period, in which the artist incorporated the human figure to his works, turning it into their true protagonist. It belongs to a series of five the painter called Personajes [Characters] and expresses the artist’s interest in the human figure and its relationship with the environment. In Personajes II, a de-humanised figure, resembling a mannequin, wanders through a landscape that has been reduced to mere colour. The scene recreates a complex, fantastic and surrealist universe reminiscent of key paintings in the artist’s trajectory, like Mural, from 1971. Notwithstanding the import acquired by the figure, Ortiz de Elgea incorporates it into the composition with subtlety and balance, creating through forms and colour a spatial continuity with the background, whose gradual geometric simplification anticipates the abstract works he would undertake in the following years.
Rendered on Velin Rives paper, the works from the Personajes series went on display in 1972 in the group show Baragaña, Basterrechea, Ortiz de Elguea, Ruiz Balerdi, Yraola, Zumeta. Obra gráfica, held at Galería Mikeldi, in Bilbao. Just like Personajes II, the five silkscreens making up the series display figures that share the same phantasmagorical appearance as they wander through a backdrop built using planes of pure colour. Through his experimentation with colour and form, the artist suggests a renewed insight into the Basque reality and landscape, whose forms, as announced in this composition, would evolve with the passing of time towards a basically constructed with large areas of colour.
Since the 1980s to date, the oeuvre of this Basque artist has been shifting towards pure abstraction, with his landscapes becoming more simplified and blending elements to produce a geographic amalgamation of sorts, created with forms, matter and colour.
The genre of landscape, deeply rooted in the painting tradition of the Basque area of Alava, acquires a new dimension in the hands of Ortiz de Elgea, who manages to instil in it new conceptual and visual meanings, removed from all the conventions prevailing until then.