Pepa Caballero, an emerging abstact painter in the 1970s
This intimate exhibition of works of the painter Pepa Caballero (Granada 1943-Malaga 2012), completes the retrospective exhibition opened in December 2024 in the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, curated by Isabel Garnelo and Carmen Cortés entitled Constelaciones abstractas. While the CAAC exhibition centred on the painter’s work from the 1980s, when Caballero was already considered a mature artist with an incomparable formal elegance, the Isabel Hurley gallery has gathered the Granada painter’s less familiar pieces, some of which have barely been studied; paintings in which Pepa Caballero moved from the figurative, the space travelled during her formal schooling in the 60s, towards the abstraction of the 70s.
She entered abstraction stating that this was not a departure but an arrival1. She considered that abstraction was a goal with no return and did so, opening many avenues in three series that run through the decade. On occasions she entangles herself in experimental works that turn out to be blind alleys and do not, of their volition, generate new avenues. At other times she launches on unique, very daring pieces, both in composition as in colour, that demonstrate a freshness, tinged with a ferociousness. And there are series that do develop an idea.
In the 70s, unlike her earlier work, Pepa Caballero moved among languages subject to doubts, hits and misses, as well as experiments in form and also cooking. And she did this without betraying herself and without diminishment. As one can see in the exhibit, the artist did not place herself in any acceptable way in any type of specific abstraction during these first steps, Occasionally she took refuge in resources of informalist abstraction, and at other moments leaned towards choosing to paint organic shapes, with abundant circular-like examples while also painting where the geometric parameters ruled. It is interesting to see how she dares in one painting — there may be more but we may never know— to experiment with a zero degree of painting; the work is divided in two horizontal colour parts —red and black— close to minimalism. This is a minimalism that makes use of hessian or burlap, the poor but versatile material of Spanish informalism. Thus, in the 70s Caballero was an experimental and unorthodox painter.
However, disregarding the artist’s student work, the exhibit commences with a figurative painting. This is an apparently three-dimensional diptych that can be presented as a free-standing figure by the use of hinges that join both parts. It shows a nude female figure being pushed backwards by a giant white ball. Painted in 1970 as a grisaille, this piece connects with the following series Grises —the black, white and grey palette— and use of acrylics as well as the white ball in the centre around which the work is composed. The ball renders the nude female figure incapable of movement, an iconography that María Lara considers coherent because “Pepe was very feminist although she was not an active member of the movement. She believed deeply in equality and cared little about the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world”.6 I mentioned on another occasion that “Whether this be a metaphor of a creation that imbibes from the essentialist feminism common in the 70s or more literally is about the imponderables that pushed women backwards and prevented their advancement, the ball appears in the Grises series as a punctum in the Barthesian sense as the element round which everything turns”.7 I believe that this painting represents the change in Caballero’s direction, towards the abstraction that followed, with the elimination of any figurative element which, as I undertand it, she considered extraneous, reducing her work to a symbolic element, the meaning of which we may sense but that essentially is unkown to us.
In some of these pieces Pepa Caballero will continue to compound the idea and format of the still-life by placing the ball in a line that could represent a table, a horizonal containing space. Sometimes there are two spheres, at others there is just one isolated shape. Soon, however, this last figurative reference disappears.
The next series in the exhibition —in reds and blues— belong in the linguistic sphere of abstraction. However, in some cases we can still recognise vestiges that appear to represent organic shapes that penetrate and are penetrated and which to me seem to have a sexual significance. It is interesting to see that she was so comfortable with red, always accompanied by black, the palette that extends across Spanish informalism. I also examined her use of the hessian, less as a support for the paint but as a superimposed element, some times stuck on and at others apparently sewn on. Hessian or burlap is a poor material, easily recognisable in the European informalism.
–Isabel Tejeda (text excerpt)
