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Arts

Inescapably Spanish

Even when his subject matter is Paris, the Castilian expatriate painter known as Yunta puts the artistic flourishes of his native country on canvas.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published June 26, 2005

	[Images from Leepa-Rattner Museum]
	Yunta, Dream of Paris, 2000, oil on canvas
	Yunta, I Accuse, 1986, oil on canvas.

TARPON SPRINGS - Mariano Yunta Lopesino, known as Yunta, wears his heart on his sleeve in an artistic time generally defined by cynicism or detachment. Which is probably the reason, good painter that he is, for his relative anonymity except among collectors who pay well into five figures for his canvases. They value his finesse with paint and a figurative style that allows for ambiguity without brain strain.

Yunta's richly painted canvases are the subject of an exhibition at the Leepa-Rattner Museum along with several dozen drawings of street scenes in Paris, where the Castilian has lived for several decades.

Whatever Yunta's reasons for living outside his homeland, he remains a Spanish painter. His work emotes, with dramatic brush strokes that are the equivalent of a flamenco dancer's flourishes. That, his treatment of light, and a sense of spatial ambiguity reference his Iberian predecessors in subtle ways. A completely unsubtle tribute to the greatest of them, Velazquez, who was also perhaps the greatest painter of all time, dominates the gallery.

The Promise to Velazquez is a re-creation of Las Meninas, the brilliant 17th century portrait of the Infanta Margarita that includes her entourage of servants, her parents the king and queen, and the artist himself. Lots of artists have created homages to late greats. The good ones are more ideological launching pads than replications (think of Francis Bacon's disturbing paintings after Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X or Picasso's obsessive explorations of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe).

So Yunta's fidelity to the original is a gutsy move, motivated, he writes in a memoir of his struggles, by a youthful adoration of Velazquez, whom he invoked for help and inspiration as if to a saint for spiritual intervention: "Velazquez! If you help me," he said he pledged early on, "I promise that one day when I feel capable I will paint the painting that I consider as your masterpiece, Las Meninas . . . in oil but with a new technique that I will have to develop. Nevertheless it will be your painting as you would have painted if you were living now."

Promise is pretty much a reverential copy, several square feet smaller than the original in deference to the master no doubt, overlaid with transparent white brush strokes that create a shrouded-in-time haze more than a "new technique." It demonstrates Yunta, 67, has earned his chops as an artist but fortunately, for most of his career, he has forged his own identity, which is on display in the several dozen other paintings.

The earliest here is In the Tavern from 1984, a transitional work, that except for Promise, is the most conventionally figurative. Four figures play cards, perhaps a reference to Cezanne's well-known card players, hunched around a table. Brush strokes give the illusion of movement on a static surface, a style that evolves into the aggressive "ribbons" of later work.

Yunta is still feeling his way in Moment of Peace, 1985, and I Accuse, 1986. In both canvases, he surrounds women with swirls of translucent paint as they sit at tables loaded with ripe fruit. He plays with perspective, tilting the tables toward us so we are in the position of looking down at the spread; the females in the background become the onlookers. They will remind you of cubist paintings from the early 20th century without the shock value of the avant-garde.

Dream of Paris fully realizes Yunta's interest in giving two-dimensional objects on a canvas the illusion of movement in a space-time continuum. Paris rooftops at sunrise break down into a mass of shifting planes overlaid with those ribbons of wispy white that make the background come alive. The title can be taken as a description of a literal landscape, or more deeply, a salute to surrealism and its champion, Salvador Dali, who sensationalized his dreams on canvas. Dali was also a master of the double image; look closely at Dream of Paris and you find faces and figures cleverly camouflaged, including a self-portrait in the lower center of the painting.

Another subtle homage to a Spanish master - Velazquez again - is The Artist's Studio, in which he, too, creates illusions with a mirror (and the "smoke" of those white wisps) and paints himself into the picture.

Yunta, who typically fills his canvases with images, reverses himself in To Be or Not To Be, one of the most engaging figurative paintings in the exhibition. A nude female who looks to be pregnant stands in profile to the left. The remaining two-thirds of the area is painted to look empty, except that the space is really a vibrant, taupe atmosphere that seems to encroach on the woman. She looks to ward it off with the awkward outreach of her hands.

He ventures into near pure abstraction in recent works, most pointedly El Pozo, a memorial to those who died in the terrorist bombing at the Madrid train station. It's the only one in which Yunta uses pure black, slathered on in broad pinwheels that look like flaying hands, slashed with bright red. It records not only a violent moment in contemporary Spain but, like many of Yunta's paintings, reminds us of centuries of Spanish painting. After all, the finest depictions of the horrors of war are all by fellow Spaniards: Goya, Dali and Picasso.

Posterity will probably not put Yunta in the same category of those artists he emulates or references. In the end, painterly prowess only takes you so far. If Velazquez were painting today, he likely would not paint Las Meninas. He would be looking forward rather than back.

"Yunta: A Spaniard in Paris" is at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, 600 Klosterman Road, Tarpon Springs, through July 3. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday with extended hours to 9 p.m. Thursday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 adults, $4 seniors. Free Sunday. (727) 712-5762.

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

[Last modified June 23, 2005, 09:10:04]