Frenhofer, Balzac’s enigmatic character, was chosen to lend his name to this exhibition by Miki Leal. An aging artist, he was obsessed with finding a way to transform what he painted into real life. His was an obsessive, lunatic, almost pathological quest which eventually led him to attain the perfect, coveted lucidness of the painter who sees nothing in his canvas but brushstrokes, colour, light and tonal mass. ‘By dint of much research, he has come to doubt the object for which he is searching. In his hours of despair he fancies that drawing does not exist, and that lines can render nothing but geometric figures’.

Frenhofer the outrider, the forerunner, a victim of his own misunderstood genius has, over the years, come to symbolise the classic obsession of contemporary painters whose mark is revealed in such revolutionary artists of the 20th century as Cézanne, Picasso, Rilke and Schönberg.

Miki Leal’s admiration for the mad old painter stems less from an identification with the person himself than with his unknown masterpiece. What really fires this young artist about the aging painter was his search for a work which, while imperfect, would come closest to an exact conjunction of applied, pure thought—the idea and material execution of that idea on the canvas (‘it is as easy to dream up a painting as it is difficult to execute it’). It is thus a case of seeking the absolute or, as the artist has said on occasion, ‘a search for authenticity’.

That accounts for the variety in his work, in his subject matter, in the characters that people the landscapes in Miki Leal’s canvases, ever ready to reveal a mystery, or to plunge us into them—landscapes which may originate from within or without the painter’s world; in his head, in a print or in the homely ambience of La Laguna, Miki Leal’s place of work and residence (‘the mission of art is not to copy nature but to express it’).

Existing paintings, or those which grow as they are painted—their glazes and layers of paint on paper attest to this process. Paintings which, in short, try to allay Frenhofer’s fear, that ancestral fear felt by the artist or by man: ‘I am but a man who, when walking, can but walk. Thus, I will not have produced anything’.

María José Solano Franco

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Room Two
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A la deriva, 2008 and in the back m.j., 2008
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