An exceptional search for places. Architecture and other animals by Fernando Díaz-Pinés Mateo

ARCHITECTURE AND OTHER ANIMALS
Drawings, watercolors and oils by Fernando Díaz-Pinés Mateo

For a painter, the motive is an alibi to paint. For an architect, drawing and painting are an alibi to build.

Building by painting begins with work, a contribution of material, making room on paper or canvas, turning it into a place, space. Then, it is inhabited and the work is to imagine how that form can remain, what existence could wait, to finally enter into action, think, find relationships of meaning, what is its character, what resonates in it, and takes it away from it. ephemeral.

Finding meaning is more an aspiration than a datum for the construction to persist. Since it becomes perceptible - even if it is only drawn - good architecture endures as if it had always been there.

The memory swarms by the imagination. Imagining is not a departure from reality but a way of dealing with it.

And yet everything that has formed can disappear in an instant.

Architecture and other animals by Fernando Díaz-Pinés Mateo. Photograph by Víctor Hugo Martín Caballero.

Text by Fernando Díaz-Pinés Mateo, August 2020

If a lethal virus had not burst into our lives so abruptly, the exhibition included in this catalog would have opened exactly 45 years after my first solo exhibition, held in the spring of 1975 at the International Press Club of Madrid and sponsored by the art critic Raúl Chávarri, who was interested in my drawings.

Then, at sixteen, he still doubted whether to study Fine Arts or Architecture. I spent the next two summers at the academy of the painter Rafael Hidalgo de Caviedes, where most of his students were preparing for the subject of Shape Analysis at the Madrid School of Architecture. There I learned to fit in, moved to larger formats and learned new techniques and experimentation. I came to the conclusion that an architectural career gave me the opportunity to continue drawing and painting, aware that such a decision would require an added learning of pictorial technique in which I am still working, and I cut that Gordian knot: I decided to be an architect. In this way, in addition to continuing to paint, I could design buildings - draw them - and even, with some fortune, build them.

Already at the Madrid School of Architecture, I exhibited with fellow friends. With Emma Lomoschit and Jesús Moreno in the 77-78 course and, in the following course, with Siegfried Martín Begué - so sadly and prematurely ill -, who became a great painter and did not work as an architect.

The group exhibitions "Modern Architecture" (1980) and "Madrid fin de Sigio" (1982) at the Ynguanzo Gallery in Madrid and "Balneario City" (1982) at the Menéndez Pelayo International University in Santander, exhibitions that later traveled to schools. of architects and architecture schools such as, by the way, the one in Valladolid, where I was for the first time for that reason.
In those exhibitions, during the vibrant times of the Movida Madrileña, in a country in full transformation, we participated a group of students and professors of Architecture who shared a passion for architecture and drawing and a friendship that has lasted over time.

The School of Madrid was then a hotbed of ideas and critical and creative activity. Like the country, it had opened up abroad. We had the opportunity to meet in person many of the most important architects and theorists of architecture of the moment, whose ideas we linked with the necessary recognition of older Spanish architects. My career developed during a historical moment when architecture changed, right at the end of what Hobsbawm called the short twentieth century. Although, years later, the architecture of the show would banalize this beautiful and complex profession, it continues to be exciting and the foundations of the best architecture remain at that disciplinary moment.

I have always had the immense luck of having good teachers and during my career I had splendid teachers, with the added fortune of working from the beginning with many of them drawing in their studies. Following in the wake of my youngest teachers, who had discovered in their immediate predecessors the teaching vocation, teaching - as to  many of my colleagues back then - it became a profession. Midway through the degree, I obtained the Acha Urioste Scholarship for teacher training that I developed in the Chair of Composition Elements of Antonio Fernández Alba, with the professors Manuel de las Casas and Antón Capitel, and, almost at the end, I did an internship in the chair of Architectural Graphic Expression by Julio Vidaurre, with Ignacio de las Casas and Javier Ortega. In this chair, a few years after graduating in 1984 and starting my professional career, I became an associate professor before joining the excellent School of Architecture of the University of Valladolid at the beginning of the nineties, where I joined Architectural Projects, I got my doctorate in 1994 - with a thesis on the Cathedral of Palencia based on the graphic approach of the project - and I obtained the title in 1997.

Teaching has always been an extraordinarily grateful activity, which has forced me and allowed me to continue studying and, in the relationship with the students, has kept thinking, the capacity for surprise and enthusiasm fresh. And, also, to continue drawing, a lot, both in the professional activity -very linked to the restoration-, as in that vicarious project activity that are the classes of projects, in which they tutor and collaborate with the students in their projects, as in a pleasant exercise that fills leisure and frees from rigorous architectural discipline, gravity, and utility.

So, as I say, I have continued drawing and painting, it is true that not as continuously as I would have liked. In the last fifteen years, a part of the most interesting that I have done, I have contributed to the group exhibitions of ASPACE Valladolid, in which I have participated together with other artists, architects, and teachers.

The intense drive for drawing and painting has remained alive and, finally, has made its way as a constant activity, turned into research, giving rise to the work that I now present, not with 16 but with 61 -and it is not that is the only symmetry on the other side of the mirror of the years, in a renewed vital horizon.

Drawing and painting can be - it is - a solitary, personal and deeply contemplative activity, even in its vehemence. You paint for yourself, it is a matter of pleasant solitude, a daydream. Isolation favors creativity and the latest works that are incorporated into the exhibition come from that situation, understanding that meaning is more an aspiration than a datum, opening fields, without imagination meaning a departure from reality but a way to face it. Only when the works are seen as a whole and a journey of intense personal content, a coherent theme and technical conception is observed in them, is the possibility of exposing -to others- what has been done is valued. And then there arises, although such desire to show the work is not compulsive, the question of having or not the possibility of doing it. The Museum of the University of Valladolid has offered me this phenomenal opportunity, which I want to thank very warmly. Which, as it cannot be otherwise, I must extend to the University of Valladolid.