Marta Cárdenas

(San Sebastián, 1944)

Prado y bosque (otoño) I

1987

oil on canvas

80 x 130 cm

Inv. no. 7000

BBVA Collection Spain



Marta Cárdenas’ passion for painting and drawing led to a vast body of work and countless notebooks and sketchpads which she filled over the course of her lifetime. These books were a fundamental element of her artmaking and an absolutely essential tool for a proper understanding of her visual world and to discover first-hand the experiences and thoughts that motivated her work.

The artist’s earliest compositions are noted for rendering silent interiors, shrouded in serene grey and thought-provoking atmospheres. In the late-seventies these somewhat gloomy scenes opened up to the outside world and gave way to depictions of exuberant nature, interpreted in an abstract fashion. These landscapes, painted plein air, convey the sensation of great expressiveness that calls to mind the gesturality of other Basque artists like José Antonio Sistiaga (1932) as well as the group of artists from the School of New York. In executing these works, Cárdenas primed the canvas with a water-based paint in a neutral tone, consistent with the surrounding atmosphere. Afterwards, with soft oil sticks, she covered the surface of the canvas with quick impastoed strokes that recreate the light, movement and colour she observes. The result of this improvised process gives her work a profound vivacity which, despite the quickness and spontaneity with which she applied the colours, transmits a sense of serenity.

Within this series we can find Meadow and Forest (Autumn) I, which, similarly to River (Winter) also in the BBVA Collection, illustrates this synthetic vision of the landscape, a result of her direct engagement with nature. The delicate grey ground, in which one can discern soft lights and shadows, contrasts with the colour-laden brushstrokes dispersed across the canvas. Her way of applying the paint creates light transparencies that evoke a sense of flow, a concept related with oriental philosophy. In fact, these works from the 1980s already foreshadow the strong influence that Asian art, culture and calligraphy would exert on her practice in the 1990s.