Since the mid 1970s Antón Patiño has enjoyed an important exhibition record with shows in galleries and museums throughout Spain and abroad. Although associated with the Altántica collective, of which he was a founding member, Patiño has lived in Madrid since the 1980s, where he works on his powerful paintings, charged with primordial symbols. They are images constructed of a cosmography based on simple icons: nerveweights, a kind of Michelin man made of wire, cyclists, amphorae, eagles wings and empty chairs that inhabit ample areas of colour, stains that evoke states of being or that imply a certain personal significance, such as black, and its allusion to oil spills, or blue with its obvious reference to water.

As he states eloquently in his Mapa Ingrávido, “Painting speaks to us of the possibilities of a limit. Painting is naming reality, shortening its limits… Painting is the map of chaos, charted in matter. Painting is map and territory, surface and concept. The picture is a surface for germination. Painting traces a plane that cuts through chaos…What the painter extracts from chaos are recurrences, those forms that were there, submerged in a deep magma. To rescue forms from the dark well of the common chaos…”

The paintings of Antón Patiño are known and admired beyond his place of origin; they can be found amongst the most prestigious museum and institutional collections in the country.

By a fortuitous geographic coincidence, the village where Patiño keeps his home in Galicia is precisely on the same latitude as Torroella, but at the other extreme of the country.  We are pleased to introduce his work to our area with a one-person exhibition in July 2006 that will explore these parallel afinities.