In “FFFF”, his third personal exhibition at the Galería Erhardt Flórez, the painter Guillermo Pfaff shows a clear change of strategy. In previous exhibitions, the artist has explored the pictorial possibilities of imperfection and spontaneity in emphatic paintings of monochromatic geometric forms. The immediacy and disorienting naïve aspect of his canvases revealed the influence of Sean Scully, in whose Barcelona studio Pfaff worked as an assistant.
Both the conceptual and technical approach have changed considerably in the large-format “Minimum White” and “Maximum White” series (all works 2023), four examples of which occupy the main hall of the gallery: sober and sparse expanses that exploit the chromatic possibilities of a repertoire of abstract shapes in different shades of grey, combined like a kind of private alphabet in different arrangements on raw canvas. Pfaff emphasizes the graphic element by integrating his own family name – questioning for Spanish speakers, a challenge underlined by the title of the exhibition – in the compositions.
In these works, the artist abandons his previous linear, streamlined geometry and, in parts of the picture plane, allows corrections and pentimenti to suggest organic forms still in motion. The tongue-in-cheek irony implicit in this account of the pictorial gesture, with all its deception and almost caricatural awkwardness, recalls the work of Philip Guston.
Color reappears in the smaller “sampled paintings”, which nod to the expressionist approach of important painters of the Spanish abstract tradition of the mid-twentieth century, such as Esteban Vicente, José Guerrero or, in to a lesser extent, Gustavo Torner. They are thoughtful, elegant and concise images, capable of conveying with minimal means the expressive maturity that Pfaff now possesses.
