Between continents

Entre continentes (Between continents) is the title chosen by Antonio Debón for this piece of geometric drive and non-figurative forms, that are nothing but representative of a powerful plastic force capable of imposing its own aesthetic ability. The work of art came as part of and gave name to an exhibition that this Valencian author offered for the first —and so far last— time in Navarre. It is therefore a referential picture, core of the work that Debón built with the idea of talking about world geography, physical maps transformed into plastic iconography. Indeed, in the other pieces exhibited on that occasion, Debón used recognizable silhouettes of different parts of the world: Africa, Europe, Oceania, America... together with sets of circles and lines projected as unconnected pieces that attacked the iconic value of silhouettes that recur until they become a paradigm of human spaces, fragments of life and fusion of ornament and calligraphy.
Despite the Antonio Debón’s dazzling curriculum, his work has remained unknown to us. This Valencian painter was born in Benetúster in 1953. He holds a doctorate in Fine Arts and is Professor of drawing at the Faculty of San Carlos in Valencia. He started out with a deep incursion into abstract expressionism. In that foundational period of his painting, Debón, according to Felisa Martínez Andrés, moved between “spontaneity and dark impastos.” In view of Entre continentes and the rest of pictures that accompanied it on its visit to the Carlos III Hall at the University in 1998, the rest of the journey preserved by the artist is detectable: an absolute freedom to deal with scales more chromatic than different, even antagonistic; the introduction of a certain figuration and a feverish search to combine the interstices between language and representation, between the concept and pure form. In the case that concerns us, this work is placed, as its name suggests, “between continents”, or what perhaps may be the same, between two differentiated realities, between two spaces as distant from each other as they are close in their most intimate aspirations. The rectangle and the circle, line and colour, evocation of something concrete, symbolic, stored somewhere in memory and form without reference, without apparent sense, with no other intention than the to let the music flow from the guts. And in this dialectic, the oeuvre of Antonio Debón asserts itself, becoming proprietary, unique, specific.
Juan Zapater López