Artist Biography - Pablo Avendano

Sometimes art works hammer you. And for a time you are out of the time, captured and captivated by what we simply called talent. Pablo Avendaño's paintings arouse these feelings; they are seductive. The figures and bodies he traces on canvas are about to diminish. Strokes and colours are mastered to play within the bounds of presence: we are right at the instant preceding disintegration and yet everything is there, still there. As relieves of life hanged to instant, Pablo Avendaño paints the last pulse before departure.

Natasha Maes, Brussels, May 2003. Javas, RTBF TV broadcast

Depth and attraction in Avendaño's paintings are to demand the spectator to last for a while in order to hold their subtleties and content. We are able to feel the artist inclined to reflection about the subject matter and the representational method of his choice. This is neither an easy painting nor hermetic language reserved for the initiated. We cannot stay non-sensitive but we could jump over the aesthetical emotion and satisfaction, for the paintings of Avendaño posses somewhat of elusive, of ephemeral, rather volatile.

Human figure is present in flesh or in watermark; its content is often spiritual. Through these fragments of reality that disintegrate, distort or fray, we acknowledge mastery in drawing and sense of composition, both promising. Avendaño is not the type of painter that eludes reality to mask poor technical skills. The freedom he takes over reality is driven by an impulsive force of pictorial aims, emotion and desire of appealing.

His young work astonish a bit for its precocity. It is asserted on alchemy of both experience and experiment, most noticeable on the set of shapes and colours. Pablo Avendaño prefers hard tones and he is pleased to join them in challenging contrasts that rarely miss the target.

Didier Paternoster, Brussels 2003. Biographical Directory of artist in Belgium Piron

"Avendaño drank from the fountains. I have seen him absorbed in Aristotle and Ortega, in Klee and Cézanne; I have seen him on the proverbial and maybe inescapable hunger for literature. Successively, his work has been valued as neo-expressionism, avant-garde's nostalgia, attack on the optic nerve, plastic poetics… So? He moves forward. Like everyone who paints, writes, breathes or truthfully lives, he moves forward questioning. What am I? I am the green chamber, the one who walks across wheatfields, the one who looks at Van Gogh or sees what Zeno of Elea could not see.
Though a painting not therefore biographical sive egocentrical. Nor supported on his captivating articulations of colour. Everything comes to the aid of a more generous purpose, magnanimous- as a humanist painting marked by violent lights and orthogonal strokes that rediscover three-dimensionality with no shamanic trickery. Frontal planes or abrupt brushstrokes for an incarnated subject that liquidates worn-out stereotypes. A dramatic and hallucinated world where all, solitude and colour, nostalgia and light, allow children and lovers alike to take their hands without fear of fate.
Avendaño's oeuvre is a call, a silent invocation of he who seeks a world in a tumultuous and disturbed world. Shrunk tenderness. Painting of elucidation. Where love is elusive and life severe with the hesitant, he begins to paint.

J. Gallo, El Escorial, Spain, 2003