Iñaki de la Fuente

(Bilbao, 1954)

Untitled

1991/92

oil on canvas

100 x 81 cm

Inv. no. P03563

BBVA Collection Spain


Iñaki de la Fuente is a tireless self-taught artist who has never stopped evolving since his beginnings in the seventies. Eminently painterly, his early period is impregnated with the revolutionary attitude that took hold of the art scene in Bilbao, which he had joined thanks to Agustín Ibarrola (1930). From the eighties onwards he became more focused on the dialectics of painting itself. Throughout this decade he went through various successive phases, some very brief, in which he experimented with his canvases: the figure appeared, only to disappear again; his palette went from acid colours to black, followed by another quasi-monochrome phase, based on white delimited by black and, at the end of the period, with areas of red. His work from the final year of this decade and the early nineties is characterised by great expressive force and the presence of spirals and whirlpools and the traces of predominantly dark and dramatic brushwork with some areas of white.

In consonance with an artist who defines his work as matter-based, in this particular painting we can observe a vast wealth of plastic and visual textures, accentuated by strong contrasts. Equally notable is the subtle use of colour with a wide range of greys and notes of colour coupled with a carefully studied composition, conveying the force and strength that characterised his work at the time.