Feb. 4, 2003
Luther W. Brady Art Gallery Features Pascual Exhibition
“In Illo Tempore,” an exhibition of 16 paintings and projects
by Spanish artist Vicente Pascual is currently on view at GW’s
Luther W. Brady Art Gallery. The Gallery, located on the second floor
of the Media and Public Affairs Building, is open Tuesday through Friday,
10 am to 5pm. The exhibition closes Feb. 22.
“In Illo Tempore” refers to a Latin phrase from the Gospels,
and is similar to the English “Once upon a time…” “This
general sense of being out of the mainstream suggests something eternal,
which is the essence of Vicente Pascual’s approach to geometric
abstraction in his acrylic paintings and ink compositions on paper,”
says Lenore Miller, director of University art galleries, who wrote
“Memory and Substance,” the other commentary on Pascual’s
work printed in the brochure.
GW University Professor of Islamic Studies Seyyed Hossein Nasr wrote
an essay for the exhibition’s brochure that has been reprinted
with his permission:
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Vicente Pascual was brought
up and educated in an area of Spain which was for centuries witness
to the harmonious presence of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures.
As he matured, he realized that the truth was universal and he thereby
adopted a universalist perspective rooted in the perennial wisdom to
be found throughout the ages in various sacred traditions. He also realized
that only in the modern world have these perennial truths been denied,
being replaced by all too human fashions of thought and art marked by
temporality and transience. His mind and soul therefore took flight
into the sacred spaces of various religious universes, and his art sought
to bring that which is beyond temporality into the temporal domain.
We might ask with Vicente Pascual, “What is art?” In the deepest
sense art is life itself lived and acted according to principles. It
is also to make and create correctly not on the basis of individual
psychological elements and factors, but according to intelligible principles
in the Platonic sense that transcend temporality and the individual
realm. It is to use symbols, as traditionally understood, namely as
reflections of higher orders of reality in the physical world and therefore
ladders to those higher worlds, and not remain satisfied with the use
of allegory, which is simply humanly constructed and horizontal.
Today we live in a world which has rejected this perennial philosophy
of art and therefore poses the greatest challenge to artists who still
seek to present the eternal and the atemporal in their art. Vicente
Pascual is among that rare group of contemporary Western artists who
have accepted this challenge. He has used primordial symbols and has
returned to the simplicity of primal forms to integrate multiplicity
into unity. When one views his canvasses, one experiences the presence
of unity in the manifold and the timeless in what is temporal. His paintings
also represent a harmonious wedding between rigor and freedom like the
cosmos itself in which one observes the presence of rigor, of geometry
and of laws combined with the freedom and exuberance of life and its
transformations.
Vicente Pascual is a contemporary artist without being modern. He lives
in our times, yet creates an art that is atemporal. For him as for traditional
artists of old, all human activities can become art in the deepest sense
and also become means of knowing oneself and ultimately knowing that
truth which transcends the human order. Being who he is, Pascual has
faced many difficulties in the present day artistic scene. Those who
hold the modernistic view of art have realized that he stands apart
from them and belongs to another category of artists. He has experienced
all the oppositions and constraints which a traditional artist faces
in today’s world. And yet he has refused to sacrifice his principles
and continues to produce works which seek to reflect non-temporal realities
in the matrix of time and space. For that very reason his paintings
are worthy of great attention for they are concerned with truths that
are of the utmost significance for men and women to re-discover and
experience in this day and age marked by the turning away from perennial
wisdom and instead seeking evanescent shadows which are claimed to be
of great significance because they define “the times” but
which in fact, are as passing and transient as the water of the river
of time which we experience briefly at different moments of our earthly
life.
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
