What is the New Figuration in contemporary art?
Maseda is one of the most interesting emerging artists of the contemporary New Figuration scene. But do you know exactly what we mean when we talk about New Figuration? The first thing to know is that the terminology may vary depending on the publication you have chosen. New figuration, neo-figuration or neo-figurative painting are the most common.
Origins of the new figuration: Historical and artistic context.
To understand how this new movement was born, we have to place ourselves in a very specific context of Europe in the 50s and 60s, hard post-war times. In another post we talked about one of the best known and recognized languages of this period, which was pop art. Born in the UK, but soon reached his true personality in the USA. Maseda retains echoes of this movement in his works, although he undoubtedly drinks much more from the neo-figurative current.
In common, however, pop art and new figuration have one trait that unites them and that is the rejection of the abstract art of the 40s and 50s. Pop art in America was in direct confrontation with Abstract Expressionism, a language that emerged after World War II. In Europe, the abstract tradition came from far away. Authors such as Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich or El Lisitski, to name a few of the classics, had begun their first attempts between 1910 and 1914.
Abstraction was born as the logical consequence of historical, but also aesthetic premises that emerged in those early years of the twentieth century. For decades, abstraction reigns in Europe.
Impact of the Second World War on the New Figuration
Everything changed with the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945). Europe opens its eyes to the horror of the concentration camps. Nazi genocide is exposed. The millions of dead that sow the fields are much more than just shocking figures. The maimed and wounded of war appear everywhere. Cities are desolate landscapes of rubble. It is said that Berlin had so much rubble from collapsed buildings that it had to make artificial mountains and cover them with gardens that today give a curious aspect to a city that should never forget the past through which it passes. The climate is, therefore, one of profound existential crisis. What about art? What could artists do in the face of this massacre and this senselessness? Many of the movements of the so-called historical avant-garde had come to an end. Now, languages such as informalism are much more useful to describe the reality of those early post-war years. During the second half of the twentieth century we will witness a recovery of figurative painting, a language much more appropriate to narrate the horrors of the new times. But let no one be deceived. It is not a return to nineteenth-century academicism. Artists will never again paint like David, Ingres, Gericault or Delacroix. Movements such as impressionism and symbolism were a break with this traditional approach to painting. And the arrival of abstraction, that last step to break with an outdated way of approaching iconic representation.
Main characteristics of the New Figuration
The expressionist trend and, later, informalism gave this new figuration some resources that it had not had until now. The resurgence of figuration is actually a symbiosis between figuration and all the isms of this wonderful and convulsive century of the avant-garde. The new languages are enriched with all the contributions of the preceding currents, especially abstraction.
Informalism and its influence
Certainly the first movement born after the war was Informalism, which has its roots in the historical avant-garde movements of Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Expressionism. It is a gestural art, just like the one practiced by Maseda, which has become his most significant hallmark. I once read that informalism was a cry in the darkness of the postwar period. Maseda also shouts, and he does it so loudly that sometimes you can hear the voices of his characters that never leave you indifferent. Informalism used drips, impastos and even the breaking of the pictorial surface. It also incorporated exogenous materials such as sand, burlap, paper or cloth. Jean Fautrier, one of the main representatives of Informalism, reflected the feelings of horror that made the whole of Europe cringe with his strong and thick impasto.
The contribution of the Cobra group made up of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam should also not be forgotten in this chapter. The initial letters of these capitals were used to form the word Cobra. The movement was forged in Paris and they never hid their surrealist heritage. One of its greatest representatives was Jean Dubuffet, who was also the initiator of Art Brut. The Cobra group and neo-figuration go hand in hand.
Key artists and groups in the development of new figuration
One of the countries where informalism took root was precisely Spain, a country that had not participated directly in World War II. The peculiarity of our country is that another episode had shaken it to its core. The Civil War, like any confrontation between brothers, was devastating. Barcelona and Madrid have become the main focuses of this language. Antonio Saura, Millares, Canogar and Tàpies forged their own personalities within the movement. At times Maseda reminds me of Saura, for that gestural brushstroke seasoned with chorretones. Both share a tearing and dramatic tone that makes the viewer bristle. And they have another common aspect. The Madrid informalism of the El Paso group liked the color black, which acted as a cry of rebellion. Maseda and his black-fuchsia binomial are very untamed.
Informalist techniques soon came into contact with the new figuration and its desire to recover the famous representation of reality. The new figuration takes as its starting point the 1961 Exhibition baptized as “New Exhibition”. The pioneers in implementing this neo-figuration can be found in countries such as Spain, but also in Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela. However, it was the artists of the School of London who were the best known.
Francis Bacon: Emblematic figure
One of the artists who best knew how to fit all these movements was Francis Bacon (Dublin, 1909-Madrid, 1992), whose work is characterized by deformed and monstrous organic forms. The English artist of Irish origin is the greatest exponent of the new figuration and the English pop art artists were, to a great extent, indebted to his work. How can one not be overwhelmed by his work ‘Study on the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez’? Bacon reinterprets the painting that Velázquez painted for the famous pontiff in 1650 during one of his stays in Italy. The haughty face and direct look of the Sevillian genius is transformed into a scream that emerges from a disjointed face of the Irishman.
The central motif of Bacon’s work has always been the human figure. Francis Bacon portrayed contemporary loneliness, horror and anguish in isolated and deformed figures like no one else. Violence, terror, isolation or anguish are the invisible thread that unites Bacon’s work with the artistic proposal of the painter from Castellón. Maseda is also attracted to the heartbroken characters who suffer and who also become the nerve center of his work. Those suffering beings that appear in Maseda’s paintings are timeless. A post-war climate is not necessary to find characters suffering anguish and despair. Now, as before, they are everywhere. It is only necessary to pay attention and look for them. Sometimes they are even within ourselves.
There is an oft-repeated phrase by the Irish artist that Maseda could subscribe to and it reads:“I would like my paintings to look as if a human being had passed through them, like a snail, leaving a trace of human presence and a trace of past events, like the snail leaving its slime.”
I find yet another parallel between Bacon’s work and that of Maseda. Painting for the former was always an act of fury, showing the most animal and the lowest of human beings. The fury, the terribilità, as the humanists described Michelangelo’s work, is also in Maseda. An uncontrollable fury that often overflows the frame.
Recurring themes and motifs in new figuration
Another of the most outstanding artists of the School of London is Lucian Freud (1922-2011), whose facet as a portraitist stands out above all. His approach to painting is, however, far from Maseda’s much more gestural style.
Karel Appel, Jorn (Asger Oluf Jorgensen), Adami, Arroyo, Erró, Klasen, Monory, Stampfli or Télémaque are other names of this movement. In the Spanish case, there was a group focused in Madrid that had its emergence in the 70s and early 80s. Carlos Alcolea, Carlos Franco, Rafael Pérez-Mínguez, Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Chema Cobo were some of its members, who were joined by Jaime Aledo, Sigfrido Martín Begué and Carlos Forn Bada in the so-called second generation.
All the artists of the new figuration, almost without exception, are based on expressive freedom. That is why the resulting figure has that extra authenticity. Maseda knows this.
Comisaria independiente, crítica de arte y profesora en la Universitat Jaume I de Castelló. Compagina la docencia e investigación en el campo de las artes con el periodismo cultural a través de colaboraciones con medios como la SER o el periódico El Mundo.