OSCAR VILLALÓN

This interesting exhibition offers us a chance to have a detailed look at Oscar Villalón and Alejandro Decinti's most recent preoccupations, examining their creative and teaching facets. Whilst some of Alejandro Decinti's recent works show evidence of the inclusion of elements of abstraction placed at the service of figurative sketches, Oscar Villalón shows a particular interest in recalling his experiences, but expressed in a way that is always thought-provoking.

In 2004 these artists founded the Decinti&Villalón Painting Studio at their headquarters at 4 Calle del Castillo and 19 Calle Santa Feliciana. It is an ambitious project that unites academic teaching in different fields such as, pictorial methods, composition, drawing, computer techniques applied to the plastic arts and open-air painting, together with recent proposals such as, children's art workshops, galleries or publishing space.

The educational role of these artists is clearly important and plural. It is no minor task for them. Just as the university has no alternative but to react in the face of scientific progress, in their teaching and methods they include the continuous transformation and mutations being undergone by pictorial creation arising out of the contributions of the new information technologies, computer applications, etc. When we share the space of Decinti and Villalón's works, we come face-to-face with the cream of their pupils' output. We are referring to canvases that speak of many things, but their interpretation has no confines.

We can state unreservedly that this is a group of painters that are characterised by the predominance of communication, sincerity and spontaneity in their respective artistic achievements. Through this modesty of exhibition, the artists attain a pleasant way of communicating their experiences by taking the guidelines set by their young teachers.

This provocative style thus fires pupils' creative possibilities, stimulating them and furnishing them with all the freedom needed to create and interpret the subject matter approached on their canvasses, starting out from coherent, sincere foundations related to pictorial procedures instilled from the very base. Likewise, a carefully considered rational control of the pictorial outcome emerges as the ideal means for achieving the essence of their figurative conception.

The Higher School of Naval Engineering, which was formerly the Academy of Naval Engineers, founded under the orders of Charles III in 1772, affords the perfect framework for this interesting exhibition, and, if, as the French historian Fernand Braudel says, "The sea is wealth", we can state that art enriches us and this exhibition delights us.

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Raúl Alonso Sáez

Historiador del Arte

Coordinador de Exposiciones

Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte