Reviews

Ceballos 

• De Rudder, Suzanne
• Boné, José Manuel

Brussels, June 18th, 2001

My dear friend,

Your work for me is a search for the balance between intelligence and the spirit. Using the pure energy we possess inside of us, you develop a universe of appparent continous change.

You create situations, events through astonishing and sometimes uneasy colours. The infinity of forms, objets, and of persons converts into a statement, relative because, they appear to be in permanent search of some events different to what is portrayed.

Your painting upsets thoose values acquired throughout the centuties of conformity. In other words, you are aware of your individuality, projecting across the canvas a reality that your "Being" needs to demonstrate through the art of painting

The depth of her thought cannot silence the strength of her painting. Because her ethical and aesthetic renouncement is an empty set. But to her regret, because her painting is written with a lot of pain, and until with blood.

Ceballos transfers us to an exciting world, in which will prevail over intellect. Opposite to the lapidary and monolithic universe of the aristhotelic intellectualism, Ceballos shows the versatile character of human existence. Her painting is the torn shout that claims for the dissappearance of universals, as authentic flagstones in the way of freedom. Her painting is the screech of horror against social injustices, and against who confuse human beings with things, so many times utilized as instruments of the rich people aims. Her painting is, at the same time, a suggestion and a prophecy. It is a suggestion, because she proposes a better man. And it is a prophecy, because she believes that this man is probable. Her superman is so human, so too human, that it is really possible. It is a cheerful pessimism, because she reclaims always the man that the man could come to be.

If something could define the painting of Ceballos it is its authenticity. The expressive and spontaneous aspects of her iconography proclaim the personal character of her aesthetic conception. Her paintings will like or don't like. But, her paintings are definitely different. It is absolutely impossible to find at least a solo precedent in one of her pictures. It is possible to meet antecedents, but so far away, that they are unrecognisable from its concrete shape. Each one of her works is a singular act. All her works display, as common denominator, three traverse features: strength of colour, expressive will and energy.

I think that when we study in depth the work of an artist, it appears always the psychology that distils his/her personal biography. And, in my opinion, the idiosyncrasy of Ceballos is concentrated, essentially, around two fundamental element which have marked her life: Water and Fire. It could not be casual that she was born and live her childhood in Barakaldo, next to the fire of the Tall Ovens of Biscay and beside the water of Bilbao estuary. Water (just remember «La dársena de Portu»; in English, "The dock of Portu") represents the instinct of extroversion, the fixation of look in the distance. Fire (just remember «El primer lingote Bessemer», in English "The first Bessemer ingot") represents the introspection, the look towards the interior, the inner look. From the conjunction of both elements, the aesthetic (inextricably united to ethics) of Begoña Ceballos gush forth. Time will tell us if the artist Ceballos has been capable to cross the synthesis of the two apparently antithetic elements of her pictorial humus.

Art, as which said Camilo José Cela about Literature, is a formidable tool in the hands of men in their way without end towards Freedom. The painting of Ceballos doesn't constitute an exception.

Original title: «Las claves de la pintura de Ceballos»
[Translated by the author]

Critique

Last modified: 03/14/04