Amable ARIAS (1927–1984) - Lot 21

Amable ARIAS (1927–1984) Sobre II, 1975–1978 Oil, pencil, and ink on canvas; signed and dated twice in the lower right corner. 91 x 115 cm Provenance: Artist’s collection, by bequest. Exhibitions: - Amable Arias Retrospective, San Telmo Museum, San Sebastián, May 4–26, 1985. - Amable Arias, El teorema de la Anamnesis - La barrera contemplativa, MUSAC (Castile and León Museum of Contemporary Art), León, February 18–April 16, 2017. - Gaur, 1966 - Basque Art in Resistance, Basque Museum and History Museum of Bayonne, Bayonne, June 30–November 4, 2018. Bibliography: - M.d.C. ALONSO-PIMENTEL, Amable Arias, San Sebastián, University of Deusto - San Sebastián, 1997, no. 264. - J. ALVAREZ (ed.), Amable Arias, The Theorem of Anamnesis - The Contemplative Barrier, Eolas, León, 2017, reproduced on p. 83. - Gaur, 1966 - Basque Art in Resistance, Bayonne, Basque Museum and Museum of the History of Bayonne, 2018, reproduced on p. 88. A self-taught, dissident artist, Amable Arias followed a highly unique artistic path in which the abstraction of the 1960s gave way to dreamlike figures poetically accompanied by color. Amable Arias was not Basque by birth, but moved there with his family in 1942. In a deeply Catholic environment, and subjected to his father’s violence, he received no intellectual education as a child, much less an artistic one. Out of this aversion to his father, he dropped his surname to be known only as Amable. At the age of 9, he was the victim of a serious accident that left him lame, and his life seemed destined to be a struggle. Yet none of this is apparent in his work. Precise in his abstract compositions of the 1960s, Amable’s economy of means often serves as the resonant framework for deeply expressive works whose vibration resembles a system of musical composition (lot 18). From 1966 to 1967, he thus created his “paintings of the atom” or “paintings of the drop” (lots 19 and 20). He then exhibited at the Neblí Gallery in Madrid in 1964, in 1965 at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, which featured him in issue 150 of its magazine *Derrière le Miroir* (March–April), and in 1967 at the Barandiarán Gallery in San Sebastián. Close to an Internationalism that opposed Francoism, he was above all particularly independent and rejected any categorization or group theory. As the founder of the Gaur Group, he thus embodied the pluralism and freedom of this self-proclaimed avant-garde. Starting in the 1970s, returning to a form of figuration, Amable populated these works with small, dreamlike, and poetic figures that make up his unique universe. In this regard, *Sobre II* (lot 22) is a particularly interesting work created in two phases. Begun in 1975 and resumed in 1978, this canvas is structured around the elements of a letter addressed to his mother, infused with the poetic and sensitive sentiments of a son, which intertwine with a script transcribed from the radio broadcast he was listening to at the time of the work’s creation, celebrating the death of Franco. Amable’s work expresses a form of surrealism, where the transcription of a parallel world takes the form of automatic writing, in the literal sense. Unclassifiable, Amable Arias’s work is a great rarity on the art market. He died in 1984 at the age of 55. His singularity is matched only by his poetry.