Valencia
He entered the School of Fine Arts of Valencia in 1949, finishing his studies in 1954. He was a recipient of the pension from El Paular de Segovia for the study of the landscape. A scholarship from the Albert Álvarez Foundation allowed her to continue his training in Paris and then he was able to travel through Italy and Belgium. He also obtained the scholarship from the Casa Velázquez in Madrid. During the sixties and seventies he worked as an illustrator for various publishers in Great Britain and Italy. He has won numerous awards in his homeland and abroad. In 1974 he won the chair of Life Drawing at the Escuela de San Carlos de Valencia and a few years later he was elected academic of San Carlos de Valencia. Luis Arcas' activity has been multifaceted, because he wrote articles and gave conferences. In the strict scope of painting he has cultivated portraiture, still life and, especially, landscape. His portraiture places him within the orbit of the realist tradition. He is the author of the portrait of King Juan Carlos I for the Provincial Council of Valencia and the then Caja de Ahorros de Valencia. Perhaps the artistic genre that best identifies him is landscape, which he has worked with in an enormously intense way throughout his entire life. He knew how to assume the principles of expressionism and give them a strong personality, renouncing the eternal Sorollism that was lavish at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts. His visions of nature are full of vigor, which he achieves by accentuating the use of warm tones, such as green and yellow, macerated with more neutral ones, such as gray. His landscapes are characterized by a solid structure, which appears both in the arid themes of the interior and in the sandy world of the coastal dunes. His stay in El Paular made him discover the charm of Castilian sobriety that he has always maintained in his works, even though they were set in different geographical contexts. His visions of the Maestrazgo or the Valencian interior areas of Utiel and Requena are a good example of this interest. He delights in the representation of vineyard landscapes or the Ademuz mountains with their stone forms. Other times he is attracted by the Almería desert, the Granada mountains or the immensity of the rice fields. All these very different places assume in his hands a sieve of austerity that reflects the feeling and emotional wave of the author when experiencing them in situ and then capturing them on the canvas. He does not like to force the representation of it but he carries out a process of representation of space, where the tectonic structure stands out powerfully, along with the power of fascination that the colors of nature offer the artist. Light contributes to outlining the spaces, cutting out and demarcating the volumes. He maintains interest in expressionist distortion and a dense impasto achieved with oil that increase the power of fascination that this dry and “poor” nature acquires in his hands. The panoramic visions of the environments recreated by him manage to introduce the viewer to these inland, solitary landscapes, where immensity is the dominant note.
Cambridge
luis-arcas-brauner/dbe.rah.es
