Antonio Ventura - The Work of Art: Between Trial and Discovery

June 10, 2025

(Wassily Kandinsky once said that a work of art is born from an inner necessity.

It was at the age of sixteen that I first felt the need to paint. A feeling as unexpected as it was surprising.

So I bought my first canvases, brushes, and oil paints, and faced a practice so unfamiliar that it inevitably led to failure.

But I didn’t give up.

I knew I lacked the tools—and so I sought them.

Guillermo García Saúco, Ramiro Ramos, and above all José Luis Gómez Perales, were the painters who unveiled for me the mysteries of the craft. Through my learning with them, I discovered that the results I achieved were gradually drawing closer to the aim I pursued.

And there began the journey I still follow—one that led me to create works I had never imagined. Along this path, I came to realize that a work of art is not something you search for; it is something that emerges through a process of near-blind exploration. It is not quite a discovery in the usual sense, because one can only discover what one actively seeks. But the painter does not search—he finds. And in that moment, something is revealed.

At its best, that revelation is an epiphany. One senses that what has emerged has done so because, unknowingly, it struck a chord within the register of inner necessity.

You don’t know whether the work is good or not—but you are certain it is true. A work that reveals something honest within oneself, a truth that will stir emotion in a few viewers. You’re not sure how, but the work takes on a life of its own. It no longer belongs to you. In a short time, you begin to look at it as though it were not yours. You were merely the instrument through which it was created.

That feeling of not being the author has accompanied me since I was young—and it still does.

After several years of study, during which I painted a variety of subjects—a still lifes, a landscape, a nude—the first deeply felt and longed-for works began to appear: landscapes.

From the start, they were bare, schematic landscapes, stripped of any detail, always rendered in earthy browns and ochres. The resonance of Díaz Caneja pulsed through them.

n the early 1980s, I lived for four years in an arid village near Madrid, home to a series of abandoned quarries. There, I found the subject of my next series: stones. The cracks and fissures in the rock revealed an abyss of nuance I could never have imagined would inhabit my canvases for years.

At first, the colors were flat, the fissures merely suggested in graphite—more stained than painted—using a nearly transparent acrylic. Later, the lines that defined the composition grew more pronounced, and the different zones of color began to vibrate. The paintings wanted to grow in size, and for years my work was defined by canvases nearly two meters tall.

Throughout those years, the temptation of construction was always present. Even before applying color, I felt compelled to compose the work as though I were about to embark on a geometric abstraction. Until, in the early 2000s, I finally dared to make the leap. Grey cardboard, precisely cut and layered, became the sole visual element of my paintings.

It was then I discovered that geometry is the poetry of composition.

It was an epiphany: the realization that geometric proportion—sometimes the golden ratio—creates a silence that leaves no room for noise. It is the mysticism of painting.

Today, these geometric compositions have the slight relief of small wooden pieces that I adhere to the grey cardboard, previously colored in search of a harmony or contrast that evokes the work of the great artists I admire—male and female alike—who shape my visual imagination.