Ramón Gaya: «Venecia no inventa lo pictórico: lo deja, sencillamente, brotar, aflorar»

Ramón Gaya visited Venice for the first time in 1952 and returned there the following year and many other times during his life. He was arriving from Mexico after an exile of thirteen years. There he began to paint the Homenajes, a form of nostalgic appropriation of European painting, of which he owned catalogues, photos and postcards. The "Homenaje a Carpaccio", with its quotation from "Le due dame veneziane", is a gouache made from a reproduction, but when Ramón Gaya could finally admire the original at the Correr Museum, he irreversibly changed his heterodox conception of painting. Although opposed to the iconic subversions of the avant-gardists, with them Ramón Gaya shared the refusal to separate art from life. Outside any aesthetic and historical taxonomy, in Venice he first connected the painting of Carpaccio and, later, that of Giovanni Bellini and Tiziano to the works of Velázquez and of all those painters who preserve the sacredness of the real. Conceived as a vision in the manner of the mystics, painting had always been for Ramón Gaya a force in transit that subjugated him. In his writings he anticipates the anthropology of the image of the Visual Studies, but it is by staying in Venice that he started to think about the timeless origin of painting, promoted as a symbolic homeland that emerges, watery and carnal, from the turbid bottom of the canals. Acquired forever with repeated variations, the transcendence of this iconic representation can be perceived only by drawing on the creative writing of the painter.