Rafel Bestard is still painting. This apparently superficial fact has more importance than it might seem at first glance, since the perseverance of continuing to paint not only anchors his work in the long tradition of pictorial art, but also renews and revitalizes it in the present, and both rootedness and renewal are today very necessary, even urgent. The importance of rootedness lies in the fact that it offers an anchorage, a point of orientation in the face of the avalanche of images, the ever-changing tendencies of the art world, and the generalized dispersion, disorientation and acceleration of our time. But if painting does not wish to become an empty gesture, a mere sterile repetition or even a naïve anachronism, rootedness alone is not enough; if continuing to paint is to have any meaning today, it must consist in making the rich legacy of the history of painting operative in the present, giving it full vitality, turning it into a living and active force. Yet renewing this tradition presents a great difficulty, for it is available in the great museum archive of memory which, despite the undeniable positive aspect of preserving such a valuable legacy, inevitably has the negative effect that its “exhibition effect” reifies the works, turning them into touristic or consumer fetishes and deactivating their emancipatory potential in the present. Only by revitalizing the works, awakening them from their lethargy in the archive, will they be able to release their potential and awaken us as well, we who wander like sleepwalkers amid dispersion, disorientation and acceleration. This is what Bestard achieves with his work: renewing the pictorial tradition by making it alive in the present and establishing himself as its legitimate heir. As we shall attempt to explain below, his paintings are capable of renewing this inheritance because they obsessively attempt to reveal the essence of painting and therefore of every painting in its immense historical diversity and formal possibilities. The importance of Bestard’s work lies in the fact that it teaches us how to look at and understand a painting and, with our gaze thus formed, we can respond to the challenge posed by any other pictorial work of the tradition: we can awaken it from its lethargy in the archive and turn it into something alive so that it may release its potential. What is this latent potential in painting? What life must we awaken in it? What secret does it reveal? In a word: what is the essence of the pictorial work? We can answer these questions by learning to look at the paintings of Rafel Bestard.

His paintings are figurative and intensely realistic. They depict boys or girls, young people or adults, animals, seascapes or landscapes that appear in situations, or configure scenes, only partially comprehensible; charged with ambivalence, they conceal something enigmatic. We cannot reconstruct the meaning of what the human or animal figures are doing, why they are in the postures they adopt or in the places where they are found. We do not know what precedes these situations or what might happen next. Obviously, as in all painting, what is represented is immobilized in an instant, frozen in time, but —as Lessing observed— the artist knows how to capture it in a pregnant moment, laden with possibilities. A narrative would explain and reveal its mysteries, but in painting they are only hinted at, opening a range of possibilities. The intensity and, at the same time, the uncertainty of this moment stretched in time produces in us a sense of unease that has a magnetic effect and incites us to keep looking. This is the first aesthetic aspect of great importance: the indefinite duration of the contemplation of paintings, opposed to the determined time of communicative acts. Signs, once understood, have already fulfilled their function; the duration of communication is that of grasping meaning: “it has made itself understood: it has lived; by contrast, art does not die from having lived” (Valéry). Indeed, art does not die, nor is it exhausted in contemplation —as often happens in museums, moving from one painting to another and registering only what they represent— but rather lives thanks to contemplation: the viewer’s gaze gives it life, and both, work and viewer, sustain and enrich each other.

The unease awakened in us by the representation is Bestard’s strategy for capturing us within the world of fantasy of the paintings, within the represented “theme,” inviting us to enter and follow the rules of its game. From that point onward our gaze begins to change, becoming properly aesthetic contemplation. We no longer simply “look at the painting,” but look “into” the painting; we inhabit its world and allow ourselves to be guided by it: we look “according to” the painting and “with” the painting. The gaze that approaches and allows itself to be oriented by the painting cannot be a gaze already constituted and secure in itself, for it would impose its prior conceptions and would recognize in the painting nothing but its own marks; such a gaze, a strong and dominating gaze, frames the painting within its prejudices instead of allowing itself to be framed and guided by the painting itself. The opposite of a strong, constituted and finished gaze is not a weak or scattered gaze, but one in the process of constitution, a gaze that does not affirm itself by imposing meaning but seeks it, a questioning gaze that allows itself to be surprised, that wishes to learn how the artist sees and accepts being led by the painting and the world it opens. Thus we find ourselves led to examine more closely the surface of the painting and to reconstruct its genesis through the brushstrokes, retracing the path of the artist. Then we discover the exuberance of matter, the physical texture of the painting, the thickness of the brushstroke and the richness of colors.

The painting itself has led us to focus our attention on its pictorial surface of brushstrokes, which is the original stratum of the pictorial act. Yet here an obstacle appears that we must overcome if we wish to continue playing the game of pictorial art. Once our attention has been diverted from the represented figures (a boy, a dog, a tree) to the detail of the brushstrokes, it may easily lead us to consider the painting as a simple physical thing, a material object —a canvas hanging on the wall with patches of paint upon it. But if we remain within it, within its spell, if we persist in aesthetic contemplation, the brushstrokes reveal themselves not as material with a certain chemical composition or other properties of physical things, but as sensations or sensible matter, properly aesthetic, composed of visual and tactile contrasts and rhythms of tones, textures and luminosities, from which the first recognizable forms emerge: the fold of a dress, the foam of a wave, an eye. We discover the “body” of painting, an entirely new subworld, wild, a sensitive surface of mixtures of colors and combinations of “forms” in their nascent state, forms in formation—forma formans (what phenomenologists call “primordial matter” or “flesh”). In this translucent matter the opaque material begins to become transparent, and form and meaning are constituted.

A close and attentive gaze at the details of Bestard’s paintings will see at this level a kind of “abstract plane”, understood as the primordial plane, the fragile and form-seeking foundation where the artist begins to institute a world. The body of painting —its tactile and visual texture, vibrant with life— appears in the foreground and reveals the gesturality of the artist’s body: the coordinated movement of the hand that feels and the eye that sees, bringing forth the first forms, or rather the first stirrings of forms emerging from the sensible extension of colors. It is precisely here that the artist paints not the appearance of something but its appearing, the genesis of things, the event of the arising and manifestation of forms. In other words, the artist paints not only an object (a girl jumping, a man with his mouth open), but how we look at an object, how the gaze operates in order to see an object. Bestard’s paintings —and this is the crucial point— show us the gaze in action, which is identical with painting in action; for the artist, painting and seeing are the same, and in this lies the essence of painting, of all pictorial works gathered and archived as the history of art. With a high degree of conscious pictorial reflection, the artist makes the paintings bear witness to their own genesis and thus reveal the essence of painting: how things come to appear under his gaze. We, the viewers, must reconstruct this genesis with our own gaze, thus learning how to see. The pictorial surface, the primordial plane, the translucent matter of the play of brushstrokes, is the privileged place of this reflection between the eye that sees and the hand that feels.

This origin-stratum of painting was discovered by the historical avant-gardes with revolutionary enthusiasm and they called it “abstraction.” The historical function of the abstract painting of the early decades of the twentieth century was to eliminate figuration in order to paint directly the primordial plane: to paint the way in which we look at things before they appear, how the world comes into view under the gaze. Expressionism also followed this path, though—much as Bestard does—without abandoning figuration. Yet this crucial episode in the history of painting exhausted its historical possibilities, became self-referential, lost sight of the world and ended in a hermeticism that the art market exploited as a decorative motif, stripped of its revolutionary, creative and spiritual force. Bestard’s work in a certain sense learns from the avant-gardes and from Expressionism in order to recover and consciously display this surface as the genetically and historically first layer of painting, the source from which representation drinks and the ground from which figurative representation emerges. In this sense, Bestard’s painting allows us to look at any figurative painting in the history of art not as a copy of something existing or as a historical document, but as the operation of the gaze through which a world appears.

A singular feature of his work, and a recurring motif both in landscapes and in scenes with humans or animals, is a strongly marked neutral background, mostly darkened but sometimes a dense and intense white, like an aura that envelops the figures and that also —following the old technique of sfumato— blends and merges with them. In this way, at another level of representation, he insists on the same motif that animates all his work: making visible the operation of the gaze, which here consists in showing the contrast between the defined form and the indeterminate background, and how one emerges from the other —a fundamental law of perception revealed by Gestalt psychology. The paintings stretch the viewer’s gaze in two directions: one moves from the unsettling representation, which is the gateway to his art and allows us to inhabit the world of his paintings, toward the background of the primordial and abstract plane from which these figures and their unsettling world emerge. The other direction moves in the opposite sense, recovering figuration. This tension of the gaze —which is at once the act of seeing and the event of the appearing of things— this coming and going from the genesis of form to formed form —from forma formans to forma formata— is constant and unfolds an endless duration, without conclusion, the duration that defines aesthetic experience as such.

The paintings of Rafel Bestard are neither copies that record how the world is nor spectacle-painting meant for rapid consumption. They are not made simply to be seen but to be looked at attentively, provided that we accept playing their game, which is nothing other than learning how to see and understanding how the gaze shapes reality. In order to achieve this we must free ourselves from prejudices, acquired habits, automatisms and easy formulas, and it is precisely his paintings that liberate our gaze. In this radical and authentic sense of the education of vision, works of art have an emancipatory and critical effect upon reality, since they awaken us from the everyday dream of rapid consumption, the flood of images, dispersion and automatism. This is the secret, the latent potential of painting that we discover only if we know how to look at it: if our gaze, guided by the work itself, gives it life, frees it from the historical archive and, as a gift, frees us as well. In this way the work of Rafel Bestard takes root in the historical tradition of painting, renews it in the present, and grants it full vitality as a living and emancipatory force, thereby establishing itself as its worthy successor.

Rafel Bestard continues painting, and the art world should celebrate it.