Vicente Blanco. Among the Shadows, I Will Return Accompanied

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In Vicente Blanco’s work, two recurring themes emerge: the construction of identity through representation, and the interpretation of landscape. These often appear interrelated, as in his previous exhibition at Galería Néboa, Os coleccionistas de formas (2024). In that body of work, Blanco responded to the destruction and transformation of the natural and cultural environment in rural Galicia, where he lives. In that ruined world—prey to extractivism and victim of an anesthetized sensibility characteristic of the current neoliberal phase—the artist asked himself: “How can identity be constructed from the margins? How can one narrate from an invisible context, one that also renders desire and existence invisible?”

The issue of constructing identity has been present in Blanco’s work since his beginnings. In 2003, Juan Vicente Aliaga wrote a text on the occasion of Blanco’s solo exhibition at the CGAC, titled Historia de una amenaza. Sobre las identidades, el deseo y la violencia en la obra de Vicente Blanco (“History of a Threat: On Identities, Desire, and Violence in the Work of Vicente Blanco”), in which he addressed the difficulties and pressures faced by people who shape their identity outside heteronormative codes: “In the work of Vicente Blanco […] there nest various attempts and expressions of homosociality, and in it, desire and the threat of its suppression and materialization walk dangerously hand in hand.”

It is worth recalling Aliaga’s words because Blanco’s new series of works partially sets aside landscape to focus once again on the subjective and the intimate, in relation to the social and political space. What predominates in these drawings are the physical, psychological, and symbolic relationships between characters—their gestures, gazes, and actions, in which hands play a central role, as they did in the 2024 exhibition. These interactions construct affective impulses, but also violent or aggressive ones, that we observe among them. Hence, the landscape (the background, the context) becomes more abstract, domestic, and urban—also more decorative—in order to highlight these subtle and evocative dynamics between male figures.

It is interesting to note how these same concerns—or related ones—already appeared in earlier photographic series such as Lo que se espera de nosotros (2003), where a group of four adolescents performed a mysterious ritual with a flashlight in a field at dusk. In those works as well, Vicente Blanco sought to reveal reality through subtle, delicate gestures; through techniques of estrangement and narrative distancing, borrowed from cinema and theatre—ellipsis, performativity, fragmentation—which now find analogies in the abstraction and semantic openness that drawing affords him. Even the title he chose for this exhibition, Entre as sombras voltarei acompañado (“Among the Shadows I Will Return Accompanied”), seems in some measure to echo that photographic series.

Drawing has always been important in Blanco’s work, but in these recent series its reclamation seems linked not only to its intrinsic visual qualities but also to the accessible and democratic nature of the medium. As if its condition as a “minor” art form—compared to supposedly “major” ones such as painting or sculpture—were coherent and in solidarity with the peripheral, forcibly marginalized stories he seeks to evoke. From a formal standpoint, Blanco manages to push his technique to the limit—very similar to that of the previous series: colored pencils, watercolor, and pigmented gesso on canvas and paper—so that, rather than becoming a virtuoso draftsman, he effectively creates a new medium through research and experimentation. At the same time, there is an evident intention to approach “minor” genres such as caricature, in order to represent the “logic of war and violence” in relation to identity, following in the tradition of an artist like George Grosz, who also lived and worked in a pre-war period.

Consider, for example, the haughty attitude of a slender gentleman who disdainfully points at a bowed, barely sketched figure; or the group of two naked youths accompanied—or perhaps we should say harassed—by a sinister, older man; the boy lying on a hammock, seemingly drawing a pair of buttocks in the sand as another looks on; the character whose head seems to float, splitting from his body and transforming as he removes his shirt; or the strongman with a prominent Adam’s apple posing before a mirror held by delicate hands, while another figure watches from above. These are all drawings that sometimes take the form of paintings on canvas and at other times retain the fragility and latency of paper, as in an ambiguous scene starring a muscular young man and a bald, long-nosed gentleman. Humor and irony are two resources that allow Blanco to mediate—or maintain—the tension between tenderness and its opposite; between love and hate, which inevitably inhabit the shadows to which the title refers.

Alongside the drawings and paintings, the exhibition includes a new series of ceramic reliefs depicting faces and hands connected by strings. These pieces activate the gallery space and establish dialogue among all the works. The strings allude to the lines of drawing, but also to the capacity to bind, immobilize, and dominate. The malleability of clay shapes faces similar to those in the drawings—synthetic, resolved with just a few strokes that repeat themselves, as we find in illustration or caricature.

Vicente Blanco says that in drawing, nothing is hidden—neither the errors or accidents of the process, nor the multiple meanings each work may elicit. For that reason, the medium’s transparency is deceptive: the full visibility of successive compositional stages, far from clarifying the image’s meaning, clouds it, rendering it indecipherable. It is precisely at this indeterminate, ambiguous point that the artist withdraws, leaving us alone with his characters, as we attempt to discern whether the scenes we are witnessing are disputes, confrontations, affectionate encounters—or all of these at once.

 

 

Pedro de Llano Neira