Daiquiri room

In the mid-sixties, Artur Heras started to exhibit individually and jointly (with Manuel Boix and Rafael Armengol) and his career during that decade and the next has given him a relevant position in the history of Spanish art in relation to the currents of Pop art and New Figuration. Daiquiri room is a piece that dates back to 2001, thus made in an artistic context that has nothing to do with those years. However, Heras shows a general plastic mode that is voluntarily Pop art, while maintaining at the same time an essential feature of that movement’s understanding of painting: narrativity. Daiquiri room is a portrait of Ernest Hemingway. All the features of this literary personality and biographic vicissitudes of man can come to memory when this circumstance is known.
The piece was presented for the first time in the exhibition Hotel Ambos Mundos prepared for the city of Pamplona (Carlos III Hall) in 2001. The marine passion and the bullfighting fervour of the writer were the lines of that sample chosen by a physically and sentimentally located Hemingway that was halfway between the city of Pamplona and the island of Cuba. This canvas can be a representation of Hemingway in the Ambos Mundos hotel in Havana.
From a plastic point of view, the most interesting part of the painting is to observe the non-attentive, technical difference against the unity of the work, which resides mainly in its chromatic intensity. Heras throws a pasty stain on the upper right corner, but avails himself of the tonal identity to adjust it to the completely smooth field on which it is based. On the other hand, the perfect flatness of the upper part of the canvas disappears mostly at the bottom, but this technical-formal option is continued along the right-hand side, including the bottles, which build its volumes with varied, albeit delimited, fields of colour. In the armchair and the person portrayed, Heras disrupts the plane and replaces it with more liquefied chromatic fields, scratched over large areas. However, in the nodal point of the portrait, on the face, and also the hands, the painter again makes use of delimited chromatic fields.
It is interesting to note that the timelessness that, in principle, would be conveyed by the flat plane is tarnished not only by material variety and its occasional irregular treatment, but by the relaxed pose of the writer, which contains some movement, and by Hemingway’s look, which do not push us away from the moment being lived by the person or character but rather induce us to bring it nearer to us. Hemingway does not look at us, and this is the portrait of a man immersed in his circumstances, who is thinking about himself.
Amaya Ascunce Parada