The sample causes a certain stupor to the visitor. How come you have never heard of a creator of the pictorial power of Néstor Sanmiguel (Zaragoza, 1949), capable of a thousand different languages, from pop to constructivism, and a style that is difficult to define but with an unmistakable stamp? Where has this septuagenarian been hiding from the big lights? The answer does not quite solve the mystery: he has been in Aranda de Duero, Burgos, where in the mid-eighties he was part of artistic groups such as A Ua Crag before launching himself into tireless and enormous solo work that can now be seen in a splendid double exhibition entitled La peripecia del automata which, curated by Beatriz Herráez, takes place both at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid – at its headquarters in the Palacio de Velázquez, at the Retiro, where it can be seen for free until September 19– and at Artium in Vitoria, where it will be, also with free admission, until November 1.
Perhaps a more convincing explanation as to why this Aragonese living in Castile who worked for many years as a pattern maker in a textile factory has not been more popular, he offers it when he recalls that he lived in Madrid and that "I came out of there very shotgun, freed from pesos that I don't stand well: the betrayals, the continuous razoring from behind, the envy, the grudges. Those things made me leave Madrid and return to the town... even though I'm not from that town”, he smiles. “He is a very important, singular, unclassifiable artist. A peripheral artist not from Madrid, but from the globe, peripheral to the periphery, and that is what makes him very important because his work has something extra-disciplinary, it escapes something from the norm”, summarizes Manolo Borja-Villel, director of the Queen.
He escapes so much that Sanmiguel approached art in Zaragoza as a child thanks to a family of American soldiers who lived in a building where his grandmother worked as a doorkeeper. A family with drawings by Pollock and Ellsworth Kelly. "They told me that this was art and at the same time they invited me to those huge cans of chips they had," he recalls. He tried to imitate Pollock's wild dripping... with a fine brush. Pollock and Kelly would influence him, but also Russian and European constructivism and a priori creators who were further away from his art, such as Miró, Tàpies or Basquiat.
When he was older, he combined his work in a factory where he made patterns for suits, fabrics, prints, with his workshop. "More than having an artist's workshop, he was a workshop artist, he incorporated the systematic work of the factory into his routine," says Borja-Villel. He also incorporated patterns, dies and dies. And he introduced in the paintings references to the history of art, music and literature, even transcribing as background of his paintings The Book of Manuel or Hopscotch by Cortázar, or texts by Kafka, Ursula K. Le Guin or Virginia Woolf
“He works from a space of resistance, almost against it,” says the curator, who recalls that the title La peripecia del automata comes from a text that José Bergamín wrote in his exile in Mexico after the civil war “in which he talks about the need for the human being to project a mechanics of the world, a mechanism against the vertigo of the sure end, death”. And he explains that in fact Sanmiguel poses in his art a game board with a system of rules that order themselves, makes subjectivity come out, is replaced by mechanisms: “Many of his pieces are generated by controlled chance systems using cards, dominoes that decide how the pieces should be built, without authorship in a classical sense”.
Sanmiguel, who explains that he has burned all his bad work - "what is not correct, I set it on fire, life is always full of dalliances, whims, things that have to disappear, I did not want that if one day I came to something I would not those things that were worthless could be taught, they had to disappear and they disappeared-, he remembers that two decades ago he left the factory. I told him to be quick: I'm turning 50, I want to run this adventure and if I don't run it now, I'll never run it anymore”.
In that sense, he acknowledges, the Palacio de Velázquez exhibition has been "a real surprise, after all I live quite far from the system, I was introduced here and it surprised me... Man, I know that what I was doing was very fine, but from there to imagine that the Reina Sofía could be interested in holding an exhibition like this, not yet".
