Victoriano Crémer 2017

Alejandro Cabeza painted this portrait of Victoriano Crémer, probably in his studio, judging by the light. The artist seems to have started with a light greenish-yellow wash and then built the face up with small, careful strokes in ochre, rose, and brown. Can’t you just feel him squinting at his subject, trying to capture his likeness, and that knowing smile? The painting is both assured and vulnerable, with a visible struggle to get it just right, to let us see who this person is. I wonder if Cabeza was looking at other portraits while he painted this one. It has a beautiful awkwardness to it, a real presence, like those of Alice Neel. All painters are in conversation with one another, looking back and forth through time, picking up on something, discarding something else. Each one is trying to show us something about what it means to be human.