IGNACIO TOVAR (Sevilla, 1947)

S/T Sanguine on cardboard 300 x 140 cm "I would like the course of my work to be like that of a river, which after shy and uncertain beginnings, is nourished by the influences of the outside world, crosses diverse landscapes, always new, full of pleasant surprises, overcoming narrow passages, doubts and meanders, enriching itself, widening with time, until it reaches the sea, until it reaches fullness"._x000D_. Ignacio Tovar is formed as a self-taught painter through his numerous trips and the stays for which he has been granted: in 1979, the Grant of the Center for the Promotion of Plastic Arts and Research of New Expressive Forms of the Ministry of Culture, in 1980 the Grant of the Juan March Foundation, and in 1987 the Grant of the United States Information Agency, Fund for Artist Colonies and Ragdale Foundation, of Lake Forest, Chicago, USA._x000D_. As for his aesthetic references, he starts from a point similar to that of other Sevillian artists of his generation, the taste for painting that succeeded the New York School, Tovar, however, delves deeper into elemental forms in the wake of Kenneth Noland, leading his work to references close to the "Minimal". His encounter at the Tate Gallery in London (1974) with Rothko's painting, placed him already facing the North American abstract painting, of which he was later interested in the compositional value of the geometry of Kelly's objects and constructions, as well as the freedom of Clyfford Still's abstract technique, with its fluid images, of changing colour in a space that opens up without beginning or end. _x000D_. Other registers have come to Tovar from his integration in the group that Gerardo Delgado, José Ramón Sierra and Juan Suárez formed in Seville, in the transition from the seventies to the eighties, with orientation to the abstraction of the group of Cuenca, and with preference for the work of José Guerrero. _x000D_. Since the beginning of the eighties his painting has been drifting from abstraction to a figuration, in which, with more and more insistence on the narrative tone, appear motifs in which he speaks of man, of his traces, of his passing, of his activity. Through the reduction to simple forms of elements with a use and a referential value, Ignacio Tovar recovers from the archaic levels of culture the value of the symbol as a vehicle for the communication of ideas and experiences. The symbolic forms are decontextualized supporting the weight of the composition and the narrative plot of the painter's universe. Within this long trajectory, the work that concerns us, links directly with the series Islands and Waters, from the late 90s-early 2000s. The idea of water is the origin and the axis of these paintings, and Tovar relates it to other symbols of our culture: the fingerprint, the fire, the hair of a Venus, the mythical image of Ophelia in the river ..._x000D_x000D_ "I start from abstract forms, and when the work is finished then I begin to see around me objects and landscapes whose structure and colour coincide closely with what I have painted", seeing in Nature "details I had not noticed before", becoming aware of a universe dominated by an oscillating and open space. _x000D_. Ignacio Tovar's work can be found in the Collections of the City Council of Nerva, Huelva, Luis Cernuda Foundation, Caixa de Pensiones Foundation, National Library, Bank of Spain and in the Museums of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca and Contemporary Art in Seville. _x000D_. Signed and dated 1998