An amusing way of defining modern painting might be to say it is genius based on most mistaken metaphors. In a certain sense, painters, poets, and musicians have flirted with the possibility of a “musical painting,”  a “poetry made of images,” and “descriptive music,”  without us being able to know very well what they were referring to. However, contrary to what it might seem, it was the inappropriateness of these metaphors, their imprecision, that was the main impetus in the revolution of their own languages, the beginning of the dream of autonomous arts.

It is easy to think of Eduardo Martín del Pozo as an heir to this modern tradition: one who has perhaps lost his ingenuity but who refuses to let the drive of this game disappear.

The Rarest Flowers is a famous verse by Baudelaire, the father of these synaesthetic utopias, of these “correspondences” between the arts. It belongs to the poem “Invitation to the Voyage,” a celebration of our capacity to invent artificial paradises. In his prose variation of the same poem in “Paris Spleen”, Baudelaire also establishes a relationship between these fictitious paradises and the work of art itself. Each man segregates, he says, “his dose of natural opium,” an imaginative capacity capable of inventing “countries” truer than truth itself, superior “as Art is to Nature.”

Furthermore, The Rarest Flowers is presented as a series of variations of the imaginary paradise, with a double face that takes place in two physical locations. At F2Galería in Madrid, a daytime paradise, a jungle; at Galería Vilaseco in A Coruña, the nocturnal paradise is transformed into a disturbing forest.

Nothing in this game of variations is naive: jungle and forest enhance the sinister, in a certain sense inhuman, character of the very idea of paradise. Moreover,  they claim the romantic origin of this topic, but they make it flow into a contemporary sensibility, one that completes the split between life and its representation. An example could be a song by The Pogues, “Summer in Siam”, which gives its title to one of these “daytime paradises.” The voice sings of the happiness of reaching nature, by the way, loaded with the clichés of the exotic, a postcard paradise; and the music that accompanies it dissociates into absolute sadness. Nature changes, it transforms, sings Shane MacGowan, and he reaffirms a repetitive idea: I only know that I am.

In the middle of this journey through a symbol rooted in the human imagination, the idea of a paradise or garden, Martín del Pozo adds some joyful intuitions. The flowers mutate into stars, and the constellations highlight their origin as a map (and he himself likes to think of the constellations not only as the first human maps but as the first “paintings”). The colour palette is worked from a beautiful contradiction, never evident: the “saturnal” yellows, almost green, have their weight taken off with brushstrokes of white. And the darkness, rather than exaggerating its drama, is claimed as a history of painting: they are the habitable blacks of the Spanish Baroque. The geometric impulse usual in his work is relaxed; it seems more like a fortuitous encounter of forms on a canvas, random and successful.

In summary, Eduardo Martín del Pozo cannot be mistaken as a painter who is weighed down by the conceptual. As seen in previous, more “musical” exhibitions, such as his tributes to Morton Feldman or Beethoven, in which he relies on an intuition of the essentially pictorial: rhythm and gesture. The brushstrokes are increasingly loose and lax, with something of a minimal and joyful mark. He refers to this with a materialist metaphor: painting is like eating sardines.