Vineyards

Ortega Muñoz continued to make his landscapes abstract in a way that would characterise him until the end of his days. This picture, Viñas, is very representative of that. The great artist from Extremadura reached a point -which seemed to be the limit- of the possibilities offered by abstraction, without renouncing interpretation of what we could consider to be the spirit of the land and, in the ultimate instance, the reality. The vines that we see in this canvas and the stumps of olive and chestnut trees are the main settlers of the fields by Ortega Muñoz in his long last period. We find ourselves at the boundaries of a realist view of landscape: on a hinge. The countryside exists, but the artist’s look extracts few elements to create a landscape that is clearly mental. Bare, totally exacting, severe and at the same time revealing a deep love of this world, for which a new interpretation is given. In these landscapes, as in the one under review, with the background stripped of objects, or full of them (in this case of vines), the space is traversed by strips that span it in directions that can be different: here they are diagonal. The painting is thus endowed with a dynamism which, like the view of the landscape, is interiorised. The picture is toned in light, whitish shades, against which the dark notes of the vines stand out.