The Nothing-Rose - Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

Buy image

The Nothing-Rose

Talayero, Susana

Bilbao, 10/07/1961

Cold wax and oil on wood

200 x 420 cm

2003

Early 21st century

07/413

Acquired in 2007

A prolific experimenter in procedures, supports and motifs, Talayero has retained her interest in primitive biological forms, from which she has extracted many of her poetic resources, and with which she has portrayed an imaginative, fragile world. As supports she has used polystyrene, paper, panel, microfiches and perspex; she has painted in oils and encaustic, using acids and heat from a blowtorch. Her early works showed her preference for drawing and her skill in creating a magical world from elementary organic images, with a ceremonial elegance recalling archaic antiquity (perhaps hieroglyphic friezes). As regards technical procedures and colour, she has a clear preference for the artist from Naples Nino Longobardi (1953).

But Talayero developed fast and her work underwent substantial changes. One of the most original moments of her career came when she produced works with microfiches that vibrated when exposed to the vagaries of the air to give a sensation of movement and life, but also of vulnerability. The use of Perspex endowed her paintings with a disturbing unreality. Since then she has continued with more stable, frequently large-scale works, in which she uses wax crayons with a creative wealth of drawing and colour. The No-One's Rose is one of the most important paintings of this type. In it she portrays, now on a much larger scale and with great decorative sense, a kind of fabulous bestiary of elementary beings isolated or in groups, a microcosm set out with great poetic force. [Javier Viar]

Selected bibliography

  • Guía Artistas Vascos. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2008. p. 200.
  • Gida Euskal Artistak. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Eder Museoa, 2008. p. 200.
  • Guide Basque Artists. Bilbao, Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, 2012. p. 200, n° cat. 115.
  • Susana Talayero : crónica inquieta, 1987-2016 [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2016. pp. 128-129, 177, il.
  • Viar, Javier. Historia del arte vasco : de la Guerra Civil a nuestros días, 1936-2016. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2017. pp. 936-937, il.
  • Después del 68 : arte y prácticas artísticas en el País Vasco, 1968-2018 [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. p. 459.