Anxel Huete (Ourense, 1944) has been working in the field of art -painting- for almost sixty years. In the context of Galician art, he represents one of the most outstanding figures, not only for the construction of a pictorial universe in continuous evolution, but also for his active participation in the cultural and political scene of his country. For Huete, painting is a field of constant reflection and research in close relation to historical time and its social and political transformations. Only from this perspective can we understand the aesthetic and conceptual transfers of his work, which, with extreme coherence, has been able to reconcile his own cultural identity with the foundational advances and ruptures of modern art.

A pintura que mira, Huete's first exhibition at the Nordés gallery, brings together a selected group of paintings and papers made between the year 2000 and the present. In a career so long in time, this group of paintings is, therefore, ascribed to what we understand as recent work. Reversing the traditional logic of the painting as an artifact to look at, we have agreed on the idea of granting each work an autonomous character and therefore detached from its potential condition as a repository of the gaze or, even beyond, of critical analysis. The painting looks from an inside that is both constructive and formal as well as historical: it relates a moment that crosses our sensitive and political experience. As spectators we are thus situated in the same spectrum as the work itself, without establishing the conventional hierarchies of who is looking at what (who). 

This constant dimension of the determining present with which Huete has operated throughout his career is not denying the variations of his painting in time, its changing and transforming logic, but rather adds a perspective of temporality similar to that of other universal entities such as, for example, the landscape. Nature as an encompassable image, also interpellates us as observers through its constitutive materiality and its environmental alterations; and again, it is the history of each landscape, of the territory, which defines its capacity for historical transmission. It is precisely this same mechanism that seems equally valid for Huete's painting, which by the way can also be read as a territory or as a landscape, constantly modified by the cultural-political ecosystem that the artist has lived in an involved and responsible way in each historical moment. 

Since the late sixties, during his apprenticeship years in Germany, his first works, still figurative and with a pop substratum, conveyed this spirit of the moment (Zeitgeist), reconciling the intellectual and critical capacities of the individual, of the author in this case, with the cultural essence of the place. The early understanding of this idea will guide Huete's aesthetic program and artistic practice throughout his career, and we believe that only from this confluence between artistic production and cultural context, can -should- his pictorial project be understood. If we carefully analyze each of the stages through which Huete has passed since the beginning of his career, we can verify this close correspondence between painting and history, both in absolute terms and in precise political conjunctures: his first immersions in the domain of abstraction and the feeling of irrationality derived from May '68; the geometries of his “cut-outs of space” in the face of the political context of the end of the Spanish dictatorship; or the production of an essentially territorial painting in parallel to the vindication of the artistic and cultural scene of his country since the founding of Atlántica. 

Huete's painting always responds to a program that is understood and conceived strictly from each present. As we have seen in the cases mentioned above, the natural processes of change and aesthetic choice flow in tune with the analysis of the historical frameworks and from there a meditated and precise tékne is executed. This technical quality plays a definitive role in his painting, not in the classical sense of the resolution of the painting but rather as an investigative requirement that contributes to the production of meaning. When in 1997 he confronts the architecture of the Double space of the CGAC (Man de cal, Albanelería fina), the technical execution turns out to be the main element of a performative operation in the space, constantly marked and delimited, painted and erased, in constant process. This geometric box becomes, in the end, a territory that, once again, observes and questions us. 

The group of works installed in the Nordés gallery are presented as a calculated narrative in which each painting establishes a tense and tonal relationship with the white space of the architecture. The absence of a narrative quality reinforces the internal and structural condition of each work and also its collective staging. The facing arrangement of works that the space determines with its marked longitudinal character and its accentuated height places us as spectators subjected to the chromatic and luminous energy of this set of absolute paintings where the matter expands limitlessly even in spite of the defined margins of the painting. These latest works in Anxel Huete's production abandon form and gesture to embrace a spiritual condition and “suprematist” subtlety, a degree zero that is nevertheless redefined in the present from other parameters very different from his original program in the absolute dissolution of representation, now towards a full autonomy of the work and its capacity to look at the world. 

Juan de Nieves