Rosendo Álvarez Cortés

Rosendo Álvarez Cortés (Madrid, Spain 21 June 1961 - ibid., 5 July 2018) was a Spanish painter and visual artist who experimented throughout his career with different visual languages, although his main field was figuration, specifically the representation of architectural spaces, objects and human figures through which he presented psychological, philosophical and cultural reflections. His works promote the conscious participation of the viewer as a generator of possible answers to the most important questions affecting humanity.
His artistic career has been widely recognised internationally, and his work has been exhibited in Germany, Great Britain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands. Most of his successes have been concentrated in the Netherlands, where he participated in nearly thirty exhibitions. In Spain he exhibited in the galleries Término (Madrid), Metta.. (Madrid), Carmen de la Calle (Jerez) and Robayera (Cantabria).
His extensive work can be found in the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid), the Testimonio Collection (La Caixa), the Schröder Foundation Collection (Netherlands) and various national and international private collections.
== Education ==
After completing his high school studies at the Instituto Calderón de la Barca in Madrid, he studied at the Spanish National Distance University, obtaining a degree in Geography and History (1985).
Self-taught, he stood out from the outset for his expressive abilities, using painting as a medium.
Linked to the La Movida Madrileña, he worked in a studio in the Malasaña neighbourhood which he shared with the artists Mateo Maté and José Eugenio Marchesi. He maintained relations with other artists such as Óscar Seco, Alfonso Sicilia, Eugenio Benet and Isidro Blasco. Among the art critics with whom he was in contact were Irene Verhiel, Cees van der Geer, Roos van Put, Tomás Paredes, Bernardo PalomoISBN 90-76768-32-3, Alberto González-Alegre and Suset Sánchez
His love of knowledge was tireless and he had an extraordinary capacity for analysis and reflection on a wide range of subjects, with particular interest in aesthetics, art, feelings and the capacity of human beings to know themselves and to learn.
He was a tireless reader. He was particularly interested in the field of Philosophy. He was familiar with the works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Henri Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Aranguren and María Zambrano, among others. 
His musical tastes were also very extensive. He was curious about all kinds of music, which he studied by listening and reading. He was interested in composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Claudio Monteverdi and Benjamin Britten, among many others, as well as the monastery choirs and Christian spiritual chant. He also listened to all kinds of jazz, soul, gospel and Folk music.
His cinematographic interests included Italian neorealism and the French French New Wave.
== Biography ==
He grew up in a small family in Madrid with financial difficulties.
After a life full of work, study and reflection, he died at the age of 57 after an illness which prevented him from continuing his work as a painter during the years before his death.
== Professional career ==
The quality of his paintings was surprising in the context that surrounded him from the beginning of his career, as he was quickly recognised with exhibitions in the Madrid of the "La Movida Madrileña" in informal settings such as garages and bars, but also abroad (Bessenwirtschaft, Berlin, Germany 1987). 
In 1988 he exhibited at the Instituto Cervantes Institute in London (Great Britain), promoted by the Department of Culture of the Spanish Embassy, as well as at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in the same year.
In 1989 he was awarded the First Prize in the Certamen Jóvenes Artistas Madrileños, awarded by the Madrid City Council. In the same year he was runner-up in the L'Oréal Awards for a sculpture.
The Término gallery became interested in his work and, after he participated in the group exhibition "Cuatro artistas, Tres genios" ("Four artists, Three geniuses", 1989), the gallery organised a solo exhibition of his work in the same year, which was a great success. This led him to be selected to exhibit at the ARCO 1990 Contemporary Art Fair, which had come into being eight years earlier and which at that time contributed decisively to reinserting Spanish contemporary art into the international scene. His work received comments in the Spanish press, which saw him as a painter "establishing himself as one of the names to be reckoned with". (El Punto de las Artes, 8 February 1990).El punto de las Artes, nº 8, February 1990.
This context brought him into contact with the Dutch gallery Schröder, initially located in Valkenswaard, and later in The Hague. With this gallery he developed up to twenty exhibitions over a period of thirteen years between 1991 and 2004. 
The VIA in Artes Foundation (Valkenswaard-Netherlands) awarded him two scholarships for further studies. The first lasted four months and took place in the Netherlands (Valkenswaard). The second lasted one year and took place in Rome. Both stays served to broaden his knowledge, establish contacts with other artists such as Luis Mayo and Lita Cabellut, as well as to offer him new experiences in his production.
During the period, in which he had solo exhibitions almost every two years with the Schröder Gallery, he also exhibited with other Dutch galleries such as Kadans (The Hague), Hof & Huyser (Amsterdam) and Hüstege (Den Bosch) exhibiting almost thirty times, testimony to his intense activity and creativity as an artist. He also worked occasionally with art galleries in France, such as Art Jonction Nice and La Pommerie - Saint-Sètiers (1998 and 2006).
Internationally, his painting aroused enormous interest, finding a sizeable market that demanded and bought almost everything he produced for each exhibition. The gallerist Anita Schröder became very important in his life, not only because of the impulse she gave to his production through the Schröder Gallery, but also because she built a strong bond of friendship and support with the artist.
In 2005 the Schröder Gallery closed, a major bump in the road. However, at this time he found the opportunity to work more intensively on his production, achieving at this stage a greater expressive freedom and a deepening of the themes that had been of interest to him. He then went through different stages in which the richness of his plastic language, his flexibility and the conceptual coherence of his work became evident.
Between 1996 and 2008 he exhibited in Spain through galleries such as Almirante (Madrid) and, in recent years, Metta (Madrid).
== Artistic work ==
"Rosendo Álvarez's paintings have nothing secondary about them. In paintings which, at first sight, seem to be taken from everyday life [...] he elaborates a centuries-old figurative tradition, where the truthful representation refers more to universal states of mind (feelings of anguish, inconsolable loneliness) than to an individual story. But the more his paintings are studied, the more evident it becomes that there is a profound ambivalence in his atmosphere. Inexorable and unavoidable. 
Like a director who places all the elements in the right order to achieve a breathtaking climax that keeps us gripped long after it has passed, Alvarez shows a brief moment, with a long aftereffect" (Van Put, 1997).Rosendo Álvarez catalogue. Srchöder fundation.Alongside his artistic output, he left poems and writings relating to artistic experiences and intentions, as well as existential reflections. Although they have never been published, this written production is of great value, and it can be said that Rosendo Álvarez came to elaborate a theoretical corpus of his work.
=== Style, influences and stages ===
His appreciation for the richness of the classical world led him to cite his predecessors in the history of art, showing a particular fascination for the artists of the early Renaissance (Van Put 1997)."The richness of his surfaces, on which he draws baroque forms and architectures, manages to combine modernity and classicism in a very contemporary language" (El Punto de las Artes, 2 August 1990).El Punto de las Artes, nº2, August, 1990The artist himself acknowledged in interviews in the early 2000s his debt to modern and contemporary artists such as William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, Balthus and Edward Hopper. Of Hogarth he was interested in the inquisitorial gaze he projected, while of Goya he was attracted by the sense of an open work. The disturbing style of Balthus and the unsettling scenes of Hopper in which, in the artist's words, "everything happens without anything apparently happening", inspired some of his series of interiors (Moñivas, 2002)Fuentes para el estudio de lo figurativo en Rosendo Álvarez. Análisis del cuadro "¿qué es lo que hace nuestras casas tan bonitas?"
The colour palette of his work is very characteristic. The broken tones of the early stages, which he mixed even with aggregates of different granulometry, give way to very pure and saturated colours that recall the work of Michelangelo, Jacopo Bassano, Jacopo Carrucci and even El Greco, as well as the Venetian School. He combines warm and cool tones of great variety often across flat surfaces, although with a predilection for Crimson, Ultramarine blue and Cadmium pigments. The author himself states:"Colours enchant me. Colours give the peculiarity of each object. The same object is totally different in one colour and in another. Colours carry history. [...] Aesthetically it wouldn't work any other way. The colour comes from Holland, from the time I was there on a scholarship. For an object to have a referential value, it has to be accompanied by a unique meaning". (Interview for the magazine DiseñArte, nº 6.)DiseñArte, nº6
From his constant interest in the search for a language of his own, Rosendo Álvarez went through various stages in his production that denote great versatility. 
After a brief period of abstract symbolism (1987-1988), he turned towards figurative language, which provided him with more intense, narrative results for expressing his concerns. 
From then on, his works focused on the representation of human bodies in different attitudes, inhabited interior spaces, and objects that populate those spaces. According to the magazine Artenotes nº 22, these were "...visual metaphors, optical games and a strange look at domestic interiors, at those shaped landscapes that surround our everyday life".Artenotes, nº 22
All his work is full of humanity. In the words of Cary Barney:"Rosendo's rooms are theatrical spaces in which stark classical tragedy and sardonic black comedy are played out by chairs, tables, dressers, cabinets, lamps and rugs. Each takes on not only an animate aspect, determined by features that we subliminally anthropomorphise into mouths, eyes, arms, feet or attitudes, but also a role. The groupings of chairs appear to be in grave conference, sharing a joke, or not on speaking terms." (Barney, 2006).
The Dutch art historian Roos Van Put points out that Rosendo Álvarez was an artist concerned with the events of a society where suffering is expressed in every possible form. According to Van Put, Rosendo Álvarez questions everything around him, and does so from different points of view:"Sometimes the paintings consist of poetic outpourings, sometimes not. Álvarez expresses with humour or cynicism his thoughts on aspects such as life and death". (Van Put, 1997).His work, which is always more suggestive and philosophical than descriptive, contains a critical view of current affairs and the evolution of human problems. In this sense it has been described as disturbing, mysterious, and incomplete. It seems to invite the spectator to go beyond what is shown and provokes a search, for resolution or re-establishment of equilibrium.
=== Technique ===
Rosendo Álvarez mainly used acrylic paint on canvas of various sizes, but also pencil, conté and ink drawing on paper. In his work one can also find other media and materials with which he experimented occasionally, such as the use of cardboard, fabric, wood and ropes to make assemblages. He also created pictorial works that become installations or sculptural pieces that could be folded, and which were intended to be placed on horizontal surfaces. At the beginning of his work, he also experimented with the adhesion of earth and various substances on the surface of canvases, mainly dedicated to the representation of plants, elevations and architectural elements."The canvases painted by Rosendo Álvarez Cortés stand out with great beauty .... He paints vague figures, ghosts. They are literally placed transparently, so that his canvases almost look like frescoes on the walls". (Verhiel, 1991)Irene Verhiel. Limburger Zaterdag. April 1991
== Work in collections ==
* Testimonio Collection, La Caixa, Barcelona, Spain.
* Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, Drawing Section, Spain.
* Municipal Collection of Miengo, Cantabria, Spain.
* Schröder Foundation Collection, Den Haag (The Hague), The Netherlands.
* Various private collections in Europe.
== Grants and awards ==
* 2006 Residency at La Pommerie, Saint Setiers, France.
* 1999 Residency at La Pommerie, Saint Setiers, France.
* 1990 Schröder Foundation. The Netherlands. Scholarship to work for 12 months in Rome, Italy.
* 1989 V.I.A. in Arts. Scholarship to live for 4 months in Valkenswaard, The Netherlands.
* 1989 Accésit L'Oreal Awards, Madrid, Spain.
* 1989 First Prize for Young Creators, Madrid City Council, Spain.
Category:1961 births 
Category:2018 deaths 
Category:Spanish painters