The Flight

As a result of its size, this picture induces in the viewer an experience of being surrounded, a visual immersion in a fragmented space marked by the presence of figurative elements. Telegraph poles, shoes, the imprint of a hand, snippets of landscapes, lines that draw interrupted forms - a colouristic proliferation of different images. Lacalle’s point of departure is the idea of visual fragmentation, of the necessary interruption of a narration for which he fails to provide the keys, leaving it to the interpretive discretion of the viewer. Ever since his first exhibitions in the eighties, his work has continued to evolve without losing a strong sense of colour and compositional dispersion. Lacalle advocated an unrestrained recovery of painting at a time when it appeared to have been displaced by other trends - especially technological and multimedia. In his relationship with the pictorial he wanted to recover the act of painting as a transmitter of signs and meanings, and as a workshop of dreams, parodies and pleasures. His referents are great painters such as Picasso, Philip Guston and the Italian Renaissance masters, whom he emulated in a major composition in buon fresco for Space One at the Reina Sofía Art Museum in 2005. Abstract and figurative elements co-exist in La huida, together with linear graphic signs and colours animated by brushstrokes, patches and tones. For some time now his pictures have evoked places and passages or transits, presenting inside spaces on the same pictorial plane as outside spaces, without spatial distinction and blurring any hierarchical view of a chief motif in a work. The surface of this picture becomes a mosaic in which several things happen at once, as in a puzzle.