Never before has a Mediterranean view accomplished to communicate human feelings with such strength, up until Joaquin Sorolla, the Valencian painter who captured daily images by the seashore on his canvasses, filled with the vision that is so characteristic of the realists, as defined by the Novalis’ phrase: “Above everything else, we look for the absolute and we only find things.”
Feelings on the Beach
Using the game of the light and the sea, along with those contemplative figures, Sorolla managed to explain the absolute of a moment, the orphan painter depicted the love of the young Valencian Mothers, he captured the maternal feeling that he sought throughout his life in order to offer it by immortalizing it in his work using that kind of impressionist realism.
Realism and Figurative Art
Beyond any mastery of the control of light and pigments, is the intentionality of the work that utilizes the particularity of the moment to eternally express the impression of feelings that was immortalized by the artist. This is what Sorolla’s realism is about, but also the figurative art of Diego Velázquez, the immortal Sevillian, master of universal painting.
Velázquez uses the portrait to tell the history of an epoch, of the Court’s meetings, of a town’s pain that materializes in a subversive way in his paintings, because conveniently or not in his desire to capture the mysteries of the human shape, he captures the toughness of a ruler, the famine of a woman, the beauty of a king or the submission of a fool.
Immortal Forms of Expression
It is precisely the opportunity of a glance trapped in the immortality of the feeling that the artist manages to portrait by using pictorial movements like, Realism and Figurative Art, which are capable of having multiple and captivating variations throughout time, which keep their conceptual inheritance intact.
