The Pancho Lasso Art School hosts, since last September 20, an exhibition dedicated to who was for more than thirty years professor of this institution, Santiago Alemán. In it you can find a wide record of formats and techniques: from the graphic form to the volume. And all this going through several decades, which almost sounds like an anthology or retrospective, if it were not because the narrative coherence is of a very resounding present.
The landscape of Lanzarote emerges strongly in the tour. Although there is a good representation of figurative works and some abstraction -especially in the first part of the exhibition and from a not so remote past- it is perhaps the telluric solitude of the volcanic land that most impresses the viewer. In this series of works, Santiago Alemán plays at being a sort of geologist, dismembering the landscape in layers of earth and color, like a paleontologist of painting, or perhaps like a surgeon of the line. There, everything that is seen is reality. It is strength. It is magic. It is Santiago Alemán in its purest form.
The character that he imprints on the graphic work is what really captures. It has strength. That which we could call pantheism in a figurative sense. It summarizes in strokes and color what the volcano, the rofe and the lime contain. Red, black and white. Passion, darkness and light. And skies. And what skies! Ethereal atmospheres that dawn and go to bed bathed by stars that make the landscape of Lanzarote even more intense. Such is the sublimation of the landscape that Kant would have signed one of his aesthetic categories with any of these works. There is a nature that emerges from a land where life is latent in contrast to the solitude of the homes.
And there are sketches. And there are sculptural proposals. And there are even caricatured characters. Because, in some way, that is what the artistic fact consists of. In an idea, a construction and its subsequent realization. It is a process of innate creation. It is the Lanzarote imagined by Santiago Alemán, that artist.
