Francisco Lozano

(Antella, Valencia 1912 — 2000)

Altea

1962

oil on canvas

81 x 100 cm

Inv. no. 2111

BBVA Collection Spain



Landscape was Francisco Lozano’s sole focus. His style, together with that of Genaro Lahuerta, was dubbed with the name of “creative gaze” in recognition of their new way of representing landscape, divested of all superfluity, eliminating all supplementary or distracting elements, all lights and reflections: leaving just the bare landscape at its purest and most natural.

A continuer of the landscape school of the Valencian region, Lozano’s early work acknowledged the influence of local-born masters such as Pinazo and Muñoz Degraín. Conversant with the work of the avant-gardes, and in particular with
and
, he endowed his works with a liking for the light of Spain’s Eastern coast and for Mediterranean colour.

Lozano created thickly impastoed paintings, heavily laden with matter to produce rough sandy surfaces. His brushstroke is aggressive, nervous and expressive but at the same time meditative and well structured in a palette of usually earthy tones. Empty areas are important in his paintings, allowing the canvas to act as a complement to the colour and in some places actually standing in for paint to colour some sections of the landscape.

In the mid 1960s the artist began to develop what he himself termed as Mediterranean Fauve Expressionism. His landscapes follow identical guidelines: depictions of close-ups that the beholder sees from a very short distance, and with very high horizon lines, with the blue sky acting exclusively to demarcate the limit of the landscape but without depriving it of its evident role. They are inanimate landscapes, with no obstructions or living presence in them, except for the vegetation. Such is its level of purity that light floods the whole of the painting making any trace of shadow vanish.