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Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño
Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view. Photo: courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño

ÁNXEL HUETE. A Critical Review

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Dates: 
28 April 2017 - 1 October 2017
Place: 
Exhibition galleries on the ground floor
Hours: 
Tuesday to Saturday (including bank holidays) from 11am to 2:30pm and from 5pm to 9pm / Sunday, from 11am to 2:30pm
Production: 
MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo
Curator: 
Agar Ledo
Documentation
Free access to the following supplementary documentation is available in the exhibition galleries; and also for download at www.marcovigo.com
- Ánxel Huete. Detrás de la pintura [Ánxel Huete. Behind the Painting], by Agar Ledo Arias (full version of the curatorial text)
- Chronology: Ánxel Huete. Línea de vida [Ánxel Huete. Timeline]
- Information sheets on the exhibited works
- Text from the exhibition catalogue (soon to be published), written by Rosalía Pazo Maside, Manuel Pérez Rúa and Isaac Pérez Vicente.
- Contact sheets and captions

Information & guided tours
The gallery staff welcomes queries from visitors regarding the exhibition and offers the usual guided tours:
Daily at 6pm
‘A la carte’ group tours, by appointment only. For bookings, call +34 986 113900
 
School visits and workshops
With the cooperation of: Obra Social “la Caixa”
5 May - 23 June, 2017
Exhibition galleries and ‘Laboratorio das artes’
Tuesdays to Fridays from 11am to 1.30pm, by appointment only
For bookings call 986 113900/04

"Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review" is the first exhibition by a museum which covers the artist´s entire career trajectory.

Photo: Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. Gallery view - Recortes do espazo series (1975-1977). Courtesy MARCO Vigo/Enrique Touriño

Summary

Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review is the first exhibition by a museum which covers the artist´s entire career trajectory. Ánxel Huete (Ourense, 1944) is a key artist in order to understand the course of artistic production in Galicia during recent decades. Advocate of  art as a force for social transformation, he harmonised his work as an artist with political activism and his active participation in organising essential events in the renovation of Galician art and cultural production such as; the open air sculpture exhibition at Parque municipal do Castro (Vigo, 1974), those taking place at Praza da Princesa (Vigo, 1970s), Atlántica (1980-1983), the Asociación Galega de Artistas Visuais (founded in 1997) or the Foro da Cultura Galega (1999-2001).

Discussions on art and ideology and the artist’s concern with the need for abandoning the concept which understands painting as a referential and mimetic instrument between outside reality and painting production — as a resource for representation — are key issues in his thought, not only during his years as a student, but also in his recent work. The exhibition follows an itinerary of moments and places which characterise his five decades of pictorial production, in which Huete’s work moves towards a progressive synthesization of the pictorial image in monochrome works, in reticular distributions, and also in his determined decision to reduce the analysis of painting to the symbolic position of the sign.

The dialectics always go hand in hand with his painting, where dialogue occurs within the scope of abstraction: a dialectic relationship where, despite being erased, forms are still visible.  Assuming abstraction as a non-verbal language will lead the artist to conceive art as a coding and to understand it as a system of signs derived from conventions which must be seized in their specificity.

Curated by Agar Ledo, Chief Curator of the MARCO, the exhibition is intended as an opportunity to analyse and reinterpret our recent past through Ánxel Huete’s career. This review comes together with a catalogue coming soon which includes texts by Rosalía Pazo Maside, Manuel Pérez Rúa and Isaac Pérez Vicente. Co-edited by Editorial Galaxia, coordinated between Anxo Rabuñal and Agar Ledo, and designed by Xosé Salgado and Lía Santana the catalogue will give light to the social and cultural contexts of the last few decades.

Curatorial text

Ánxel Huete. Behind the painting
By Agar Ledo Arias


“We will always be signs of a certain time,
traces of a cultural period,
symbols of the past” [i]
  
In one of the images accompanying this text[ii], we see a group of protesters portrayed in Berlin during protests called in December 1970 in various European capitals to denounce the Burgos Trial, a summary trial of sixteen ETA members accused of murder and “continued general rebellion”. During the trial, which took place in the aforesaid Spanish city, six of the defendants were sentenced to death, prompting strong protests and international opposition to the Franco regime, which forced the dictator to pardon the prisoners.
The photo shows the head of the demonstration with a group holding portraits of the sentenced prisoners, painted by Ánxel Huete (Ourense, 1944), who had begun collaborating with the Communist Party shortly after his arrival in Berlin in 1969. He combined political activism in Marxist spheres with studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, where he studied under Professor Hann Trier, a German artist who, with his research on movement and abstraction, had participated in the most recent editions of documenta in Kassel, and who would be fundamental in the changes that were going to come about in Huete’s career at that time.
Trier was one of the most influential figures in Huete's training, and it was he who introduced the artist to abstraction. Huete arrived in Germany, after having studied in Barcelona between 1965 and 1968, where he had abandoned the expressionist ruralism of his early works and where, after a trip to London, he started to paint the caricatured figures of his pop series: priests and satraps portrayed with deliberate awkwardness and bound, also in their meaning, to real referents. The pop genealogy of which Huete’s early work forms part is that of political commitment, a kind of agit prop very different from the sham, superficial pop decried by Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, and more akin to the acidity of George Grosz and the brutality of Otto Dix, two German artists who, from the left wing of the new objectivity, most satirised the disasters of war and the cynicism of power.
 
Art and Ideology
Huete’s pop series works precede his Berlin protest portraits, which must be contextualised in relation to his anti-Franco militancy as a member of the Communist Party. From the Communist Party, Huete could easily juggle painting and ideology: he identified the critical dimension of art and worked from a stance that was committed, yet distant from the propaganda of socialist realism. Owing precisely to that connection with the ideological discourse of the time, in West Germany in 1968 and 1969, it would have been truly strange if Huete had insisted on continuing to explore the path of pop figuration. In the Berlin of the period, debate abounded on the abstract art being produced in Communist circles since disputes had arisen back in the 1940s between the proponents of figuration and realism and those who supported abstraction. This tension, which was a constant throughout the 20th century (and which perfectly shows the confrontation featuring Roger Garaudy and Louis Aragon regarding the adoption of realistic aesthetics in the Communist Party[iii]), is a debate that Huete incorporates into his concerns. By way of example, in “D'un sans réalisme rivages” (1963), one of Garaudy’s most translated works, the author had introduced the term “abstract realism” to refer to an artistic practice of a Marxist nature which had arisen as a criticism of Stalinist Soviet realism and which defended abstraction (both objective and subjective) as a form of realism. Huete, who would draw on the term to justify the changes occurring in his painting over the following decade, conceived it as a way of maintaining the ideological influence of Marxist analysis without assuming the formalist reductionism of the most dogmatic communism.
According to Huete, “The pursuit of ideological significance originates from the understanding of art as a significant, discursive and possibly transforming element, which only achieves a relevant, communicative value when it assumes, with theoretical and critical rigour, a formulation in line with the time and cultural background in which it is produced.”[iv] Image production is clearly an ideological practice related to social, economic and cultural factors, and in order to study Art, it must be placed within its own social context. If, in our analysis, we take into account the artist's political and ideological position, as mentioned above, it is hardly surprising to see a young Huete resolving to move towards abstraction when attending Trier’s class: on the one hand, the Cold War had brought the debates between realism and abstraction together and politicised the styles representing both blocs (abstract expressionism in the Western bloc and socialist realism in the Eastern countries); on the other hand, in the Federal Republic of Germany, where informal art had been institutionalised in the post-war period, there was a link between the wake of horror left by totalitarian systems (such as Nazism and Stalinism) and figurative art[v]. For Huete, abstraction made an art that was militant but, at the same time distant from propaganda, possible.

The debate on abstraction
When Ánxel Huete started to paint, in the mid-1960s, the conventions of representation in painting had long been abandoned.  Decades before, cubism had broken with the tradition which understood painting as a window through which to view the world from a single perspective.  Malevich and Rodchenko had also reached the end (there will be no more representation, pronounced the latter) and Duchamp had questioned “purely retinal” painting. These issues, which had been on the table since the early decades of the 20th century, had been taken up again after the Second World War, during that break with the conventions of contemplation that would force spectators to interrupt their knowledge of the history of art and of pictorial sign, and to assume certain new semiotic conventions in order to approach painting.
Hence, the first of Huete’s works belongs to a time when painting had overcome all the limitations of modernity, when the very terms used for centuries to refer to it ceased to have any meaning: painting was no longer illusionist, but flat, with no depth; hence, the complementary opposition between background and figure was redundant as a resource. Painting was no longer autonomous, but full of impurities, linked to specific social and historical contexts, in contrast to the myth of abstract art as something pure and autonomous In the sixties, in the middle of the post-Modern period, space is understood as fragmented, non-unitary, authoritarian, or homogeneous; meanings are open and unstable, and codes, both visual and linguistic, are the result of pre-established conventions.  Furthermore, abstraction gives rise to a shift in the production of meaning, from the artist’s position to the reception or completion of the work by the observer, and the consideration of the work of art as a text that demands a reversal in the traditional categories and the birth of a new conception of this text as the creator of social bonds[vi].
Despite Huete's clear affiliation to abstraction, and his rapid abandonment of representative painting, the intricacies underlying this affirmation cannot be overlooked. The term itself implies a complexity (given its broad semantic scope) which, since the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century, has continued to stoke up debate around painting. In Huete’s oeuvre, registers ranging from pop to geometrism overlap each other, and his approach is more complex than that of “modern, formalistic” abstraction.  Huete's introduction to abstraction is semiotic and requires a semantic approach, in which the notion of plastic sign acquires all its importance[vii]. Indeed, the artist sees no contradiction between sign and abstraction, and dialogue with the figure is a constant presence in his oeuvre: he will paint the same signs over and over again, not in a denotative way, but as examples[viii]. The dialectics always go hand in hand with his painting, wherein one can never immediately recognise what is seen, where dialogue occurs within the scope of abstraction: a dialectic relationship where, despite being erased, forms are still visible.  As Rosalind Krauss, one of Huete’s most cited authors, would say, they will be present, even through their absence. Assuming abstraction as a non-verbal language will lead the artist to conceive art as a coding and to understand it as a system of signs derived from conventions which must be seized in their specificity and historicity[ix].
Debate on art and ideology and the artist’s reflection on the need for abandoning the concept which understands painting as a referential, mimetic instrument between the external reality and pictorial production (as a representational resource) are fundamental; not only during Huete’s training (the seventies, when his works continue to abstract the motif on the basis of the external reality) but also in his recent work. Throughout his fifty-year career, Ánxel Huete has never ceased to ponder on how art can function critically without the need for meaning to conform to a referent.  Over five decades, his work has constantly expressed that obsession to reduce and synthesise icons to their symbolic value, that obsession for form and its concealment, in both monochromatic colour schemes and grid layout, but also in mechanical processing as opposed to expressive gesture. […]
 
Gesture and the artist's presence
Huete's cerebral painting, which requires an effort from the beholder to identify with its content[x], begins to incorporate gesture as a personal imprint. The Surtidores [Pumps], a series of petrol pumps painted between 1979 and 1980, and presented for the first time in the exhibition Atlántica. Últimas tendencias das artes plásticas en Galicia [Atlántica.Latest trends in the plastic arts in Galicia] (Casa da Cultura, Baiona, 1980,) still evince this obsession with the plane which, according to authors such as Manolo Figueiras, is one of the most salient features of Huete's work during this period[xi]. This is the beginning of a time during in which Huete broadens the scale of his work, in order to approach human proportion and he begins to lend importance to gesture as a programme of indexicality. This is a long, protracted route over a number of different series until the nineties, when there is a shift in his work, as he divests himself of any personal physical footprint.
Atlántica (1980 - 1983), a collective project behind which Huete was a driving force, was a genuine manifestation of postmodernism, which came about probably without even being aware of it. It recovered the momentum of exhibitions such as Arte Jove de Galicia [Young Galician Art] young art 1973, organised in A Coruña by Luís Seoane and the Carlos Maside Museum, and Vinte galegos artists [Twenty Galician Artists] (1977) in the Municipal Museum in Santiago de Compostela. It also took over the baton from initiatives such as the Laboratorio de Formas [Laboratory of Forms], the institution conceived by Isaac Diaz Pardo and Luís Seoane (during their meetings in the Republican exile in the sixties) which condenses the lines of thought over which the Sargadelos group was formed. Atlántica occurred in a time when, in European painting, a return to the perceptual conventions of mimetic representation, of the hierarchical relationships between background and figure, was experienced. A new return to order, according to the interpretation of certain Marxist critics[xii]. […]
Even though in the eighties he had not yet read Pierre Bourdieu, Huete already interpreted that in the "field of artistic production, the artist was debtor" and that art production was a collective event, where the individual enters into dialogue with the social, and in which the creative action is diluted with theoretical and critical components, as well as with the reception given to the art product in a defined cultural setting[xiii]. This position was reaffirmed in the text on Atlántica published in the catalogue of the review organised by MARCO Vigo (2002): "Within the creation of Atlántica beats the intuition of a new standard in art production and relations, undertaken as collective project in the consideration that culture is precisely that: a collective project oriented toward a process that not only takes into account reflection on art itself, but the way that it embodies its own setting and its recipients, in an exercise that contemplates the problems of reception and even the meaning of the artistic work. At the same time, Atlántica perceived the theoretical significance of post-modernism and envisaged that it went beyond the mere eclecticism demonstrated by its own exhibitions, and beyond the vibrancy and energy fostered by the return to painting, and in the very process of its dual conception it postulated: on the one hand, content citing the relationships between determinant social factors and production factors, plus the reflection on language; and on the other, a methodology for self-management which was both emancipatory and critical of the institution”.[xiv] […]
The eighties sees the appearance of series such as Amigo [Friend], dedicated to the painter Guillermo Monroy, who passed away in 1982 while Huete was returning from his second trip to New York.  Working in series—a methodology that Ánxel Huete will maintain throughout his career and one which accentuates the procedural and interrelated nature of his oeuvre—allows us to appreciate the progressive increase in gesture which will characterise the ensuing work. […] The backgrounds acquire increasing prominence, a foretaste of future work, but they remain on the same surface plane as the form.  He regularly presented the works in exhibitions (such as the the Pontevedra Biennial the Museum of the Galician People, the Casa da Parra or Kiosco Alfonso in A Coruña), and in galleries (such as Gruporzán, Abel Lepina or Trinta), a symptom of the changes that had recently come about in exhibition modes and venues, in a setting of progressive institutionalisation, which in the eighties laid the foundations for the structure of art in Galicia.
In Baiona, where every summer Román Pereiro organised encounters between artists and writers at his O Toutizal country house (Baiona Horizonte Atlántico, 1988), Huete presents a set of mobile sculptures, exercises which hark back to his earliest experimentation with sculpture in Berlin, in 1970, and to which he will return at different times in his career. These pieces constitute a practice which is transversal to painting, with a certain degree of continuity over the decades.  The large mobiles displayed in Baiona are merely dialogues with the landscape around his studio, now in Domaio, on the Vigo estuary, opposite the shipyards and cranes of Vigo's cargo port.  These are sober, monochrome pieces, a million miles from the expressionism of his earlier works. The origin of Huete's progressive detachment from gesture can be traced back to this time, since, at the Baiona exhibition, in addition to the sculptures, he displayed virtually monochrome paintings offering an early glimpse of problems such as repetition, seriality or scale, quality of his latest work. The works of the late eighties and early nineties, the bodegones civiles y místicos [civil and mystics still lifes] (1988 -1989) or the Fenecia [Phoenicia] series (1990 -1991), show this abandonment of gesture, which gradually disappears completely from the picture. A process of synthesis which coincides with the schematisation of symbolic elements, with chromatic reductionism as an indication of austerity, and with that approach to monochrome which situates these works as precursors of brickie painting.

Brickie painting
In Europe, the curtain was brought down on the eighties by a documenta exhibition in Kassel (the eighth edition, held in 1987), which focused on the functional integration of art and placed aesthetic autonomy and painting in a non-hegemonic position.  A post-modernist approach which coincided with the displacement of expressionism and the onset of a new abstraction, one which was going to reconcile with the referent to reclaim the ideology and content and meaning of painted works[xv]. At this juncture, Huete began “to focus on the most essential aspects of painting, taking the work of bricklayers and house painters as one of his references, but without entering into what was called material art[xvi]", a process of synthesis which would result in disappearance, in the reduction of painting to a zero degree[xvii], free of both genius and subjectivity.  This process, as Huete recalls, possibly got under way with a series of polyester resins painted in the summer of 1991 in the studio of the artist, Xurxo Oro Claro, in Allariz. As a support he employed a silk fabric of different colours, over which he spread one single pigment, understanding painting as that which occurs on the surface of the painting: "Thus I began to think that the visuals elements that appeared were already there, being uncovered by the application of a colour different from that of the background.  Despite this notion being somewhat of a cliché, it infers the existence of something hidden, concealed, transposed to the visible surfaces”[xviii]. His work Ulrike, Ulrike Meinhof (1991)—a tribute to Berlin RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion - Red Army Faction) and the murky death of its founder, Ulrike Meinhof—transforms the voids into the evocation of her absence.  The title, once again, is a digression into the real, an extended aside.
In Huete's work, the process of synthesis passes through monochromy, the complete opposite of the gestural. He seeks formulas to refer to the underlying existence, the loss of public memory, manipulation and obscurity: he hides, covers, conceals, masks, inters, buries, disguises and renders invisible. A process that will run for two decades in series such as Océano [Ocean], Bosnia, Recículas [Grids], Albanelería fina [Fine Masonry], Ocultacións [Concealment], Estrutura da Memoria [Structure of the memory], Invisible and Realdade subxacente [Underlying Reality] (1993-2017), works that mark out a long path towards the total absence of iconicity. He begins to use elements such as monochrome or contingency, intervening on the canvass but allowing it to be the process itself which provides the pictorial solution. […]
Huete arrives at the grid by eliminating all layers of representation, based on “the renouncement, never fully made, of all the iconic elements of painting, and with a tremendous speed of reduction”[xix]. The disturbances which occur on the surface of the canvas gradually transform the lines until they merge with the background, eliminating the duplication of planes and entering into dialogue with that underlying it. These are procedural changes which also alter the conceptual design of painting. He now dominates the distancing —in the author's words[xx], the distance from the expressive intentionality— in both the Albanelería fina [Fine masonry] series (1995-1997) and in the intervention, Man de cal [Coat of lime]. Albanelería fina [Fine masonry] (1997) in the CGAC's Double space, a point of inflection in Huete's work and, as the artist himself explains, an action of concealment in both the literal and theoretical senses. His proposal, a reflection on painting itself, is resolved with virtually flat colours, in chromatic sectors divided into four sections by two orthogonal axes, formalising in the space the idea of house painting and brickie painting, an expression Huete takes a poem by Joan Salvat-Papasseit, who refers to the house painter and the use of tools and techniques of painters in the building trade.  Curated by the artist and writer, Manolo Figueiras (one of the authors who best interpreted the changes in chromaticism—colour as a structural sign, as pure materiality—which marked the different stages in Ánxel Huete's painting), the intervention defends “painting as a code and the wall as a place for painting[xxi]”, as a background where organic and mechanical aspects coexist alongside the gesture and the invoice, a dialectical relationship from within which the circumstantial signs that function as a comment emerge and once again alert of the presence of the artist, discrepancies in the process of depersonalising the creative act: the traces of the painting process, the logic of the index, the dialectic between matter and gesture, between the wall surface and surrounding space all show through.

Matter and absence of form
The impact that this intervention had on Huete's later work is immediately apparent in a series of large-format monochrome works which cover the object represented under paint stains. At this time, Huete begins to question concepts relating to the disappearance of the image or the absence of representation, since he understands "representation" to be a broad, polysemic field, and "image" as any other non-retinal formulation: “representation means being in place of,” insists the artist, “which does not reduce its meaning to mimetic representation.”[xxii] […]
Huete has never stopped painting, but, in his zeal for reduction, he abandoned the brush in his work a long time back, resorting to tools such as sponges or fumigators to achieve the flat, neutral surfaces that also eliminate all traces of authorship. It is down to us (the death of the author will translate into the birth of the reader-spectator[xxiii]) to enter into the work, to produce meaning in these intervals that are generated in the reception space, reading between the strata uncovered by the Estrutura da Memoria [Structure of the memory] series (2000 - 2002), large-format paintings whose anti-iconic bent suggests a denouncement of the invisible mechanisms behind the structures of power.  The ideology underlying his series is once again reinforced by the titles, the connecting thread between transmitter-work-recipient: Memoria de Ruanda [Memory of Rwanda], Memoria de Dubrovnik [Memory of Dubrovnik ], Memoria de Sierra Leona [Memory of Sierra Leone]. Words that place us (alongside the work and the author) in a relational space, of dissolution between the personal and the political, or between the intimate and the public.  A space, as Huete wrote, "wherein arises a non-autonomous symbolic system, in which the artist is aware of the support of the power and of the culture where he is situated, were he places his work and positions his language as a mirror of his thought in a complex, non-speculative operation that is full of critical attitude from a negotiating position that is political, civil and civilised”[xxiv].  A context in which the aesthetic experience is confused with actual experience. […]

Critical review
The exhibition Ánxel Huete. A critical review is an opportunity to reconstruct the career of an artist who is essential in understanding the passage of artistic production in Galicia over recent decades, but it is also an opportunity to bring together the images of electric chairs, homages to Ulrike Meinhof, the concealments of the memory, military conflict and other signs from the global society projected in the absence of representation in the latest series painted by the artist. Perhaps thus we can generate a different account of our artistic practice, from the present, to study how personal narratives affect collective ones, and not just the other way round.
It is interesting to position Huete in this account as a pivotal artist, one who serves as a bridge between generations. If we drew up a genealogy of Galician art over recent decades, he would, of course, be an essential component. And I say genealogy, understood as an aim, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, as a method for retracing that route along which certain interpretations have been displacing others. Instead of trying to understand Huete's work by adapting it to the history of art we were taught, we should attempt to extend the limits and, on the basis of Huete, and of his encounters and his work, explore the spirit of an era, given that, as the artist himself asserted in a recent intervention, “we will always be signals that constitute hints of a specific time, marks of a cultural epoch, signs of the past.”[xxv]
 
Agar Ledo Arias
 [Excerpt from the curatorial text for the catalogue Ánxel Huete. A Critical Review. MARCO, 2017]


[i] Ánxel Huete, 2006
[ii] The photograph, bearing the caption “Franco's opponents in Berlin,” was taken by photographer Uwe Reuter to illustrate the item of news published on pages 60 and 61 of the German weekly, Der Spiegel.
[iii] The decision was lauded by Aragon, who understood socialist realism as the ultimate form of art, and denounced by Garaudy, who considered communist intolerance toward abstraction untenable.
[iv] Ánxel Huete, in a conversation with Agar Ledo, summer 2016.
[v] “Figurative painting was inevitably associated with one or other of the totalitarian horrors; thus, inevitably, with human nature being as it is, any painter who continued working in figuration was discredited, however praiseworthy his political behaviour may have been.” Arthur C. Danto, “Lo puro, lo impuro y lo no puro: la pintura tras la modernidad”, in Nuevas abstracciones, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona, 1996.
[vi] Concepts such as the death of the author or the social bonds of the text, drawn from works by Roland Barthes, are fundamental in understanding the creative act since the sixties. Essays such as Writing Degree Zero (1953), The Death of the Author (1967), From Work to Text (1971) and, above all, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), form part of Ánxel Huete's library and are key in understanding this approach to painting from semiotics, which the artist defends.
[vii] Georges Roque, Qu'est-ce que l'art abstrait ? Une histoire de l'abstraction en peinture, 1860-1960, Gallimard, París, 2003 (2012), p. 22
[viii] The function of which is not that of representing an object. Nelson Goodman, Los lenguajes del arte. Aproximación a la teoría de los símbolos, Paidós Ibérica, Barcelona, 2010.
[ix] “The work of art seen as a symbolic asset (and not as an economic asset, although it always is) only exists as such for anyone who has the means to appropriate it by means of decoding; i.e., for those who have the historically constituted code, which is recognised socially as the condition of symbolic appropriation of works of art offered to a given society at a given moment in time.” Pierre Bourdieu, “Disposición estética y competencia artística”, in Lápiz. Revista internacional de arte, no. 166, October 2000, p. 37.
[x] Pablos, “Pintura de Ángel Huete”, in Faro de Vigo, 13.2.79.
[xi] Manolo Figueiras, “Muros de pintura. El lugar de la espera”, in Ánxel Huete (exhibition catalogue), Galician Centre of Contemporary Art (CGAC), Xunta de Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, 1997, pp. 13-34.
[xii] For Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens and Benjamin Buchloch (critics linked to the Marxist journal, October), the rhetoric accompanying this resurgence is reactionary.
[xiii] Pierre Bourdieu, “¿Y quién creó a los creadores?”, in Sociología y Cultura, Grijalbo, Mexico, 1990, p. 225.
[xiv] Ánxel Huete, “La perplejidad de Stanley”, in Atlántica. Vigo 1980-1986 (exhibition catalogue), MARCO, Museum of Contemporary Art ofVigo, Vigo, 2002, p. 242.
[xv] Demetrio Paparoni, “La abstracción redefinida”, in Nuevas abstracciones, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona, 1996.
[xvi] Manolo Figueiras, “Muros de pintura. El lugar de la espera”, in Ánxel Huete (exhibition catalogue), Galician Centre of Contemporary Art (CGAC), Xunta de Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, 1997.
[xvii] Term used by Huete and some authors who have written about his work to refer to the work carried out since the nineties. The term originates from Malevich, Tatlin and the Suprematists' attempts to reduce painting and sculpture to a minimum in the 1910s, from their efforts to determine the minimum essential painting or sculpture.  Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Arte desde 1900. Modernidad, antimodernidad, posmodernidad (2004), Akal, Madrid, 2006, pp. 131-133.
[xviii] Ánxel Huete, in a conversation with Agar Ledo, summer 2016.
[xix] Ánxel Huete (in conversation with Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego), “O proceso Huete”, in Revista das letras, O correo galego, 22/5/1997, p. 2
[xx] Ánxel Huete (in conversation with Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego), “O proceso Huete”, in Revista das letras, O correo galego, 22/5/1997, p. 2 We refer to the concept of estrangement used by Bertolt Brecht in his theatre, to which Manolo Figueiras resorts in order to draw a parallel with Huete's work. Manolo Figueiras, “Muros de pintura. El lugar de la espera”, in Ánxel Huete (exhibition catalogue), Galician Centre of Contemporary Art (CGAC), Xunta de Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, 1997, p. 22.
[xxi]  Manolo Figueiras, Ánxel Huete, exhibition leaflet Man de cal. Albanelería fina, CGAC, 1997.
[xxii]  Ánxel Huete, in a conversation with Agar Ledo, summer 2016.
[xxiii] "The birth of the reader is paid with the death of the author," writes Barthes writes in the final part of his essay Death of the Author (1967)
[xxiv]  Ánxel Huete, “Civilidade artística”, in Sinal, nº 0, AGAV, Asociación Galega de Artistas Visuais, Santiago de Compostela e Vigo, 2000, p. 40.
[xxv] Ánxel Huete, “Dentro ou fóra do cadro”, in María Luisa Sobrino and Almudena Fernández Farina (eds.), Arte + pintura, Consello da Cultura Galega, 2015, p. 75.

Curator

Agar Ledo

Agar Ledo is Chief Curator of the MARCO Vigo, where she has directed and curated the museum exhibition program for the last decade. She has curated exhibitions by artists Ánxel Huete, Grace Schwindt, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Patricia Esquivias, Pedro Barateiro, Carlos Bunga and Diego Santomé, among other proposals focused on the analysis of the cultural production in Galicia and the social and political implications around artistic practices. Ledo has a Master’s Degree in Museology and training residencies at Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, OK), Le Consortium (Dijon), Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon and ICI-Independent Curators International (New York). Her professional career has lead her to work at CGAC (Santiago de Compostela, 1998-2004), Fundación Luis Seoane (A Coruña, 2005) and at  the first edition of BIACS (Seville, 2004-2005), in which she worked as exhibitions coordinator under the guidance of one of the most far-sighted curators and art historians on the 20th Century: Harald Szeemann. She regularly writes texts for specialised publications and is member of the Grial magazine editorial board. She collaborates as a teacher in some of the post-graduate courses at the University of Vigo (MD in Contemporary Art, Creation and Research, 2016-2017) and at the University of Santiago de Compostela (University Expert in Cultural Management, 2015-2017; MD in Art, Museology and Contemporary Critic, 2008-2012).