Libro de los artistas - Ignacio Gómez de Liaño

‘There is nothing like looking at the making to know what the saying means’, wrote Gómez de Liaño in one of the pages of this book, which collects the author’s best essays –from a distant 1977 up to the present, and includes some unpublished texts– a subtle observatory of an analytic steel blue scalpel, whose encyclopaedic erudition can only be compared to his endless curiosity.

From a close and passionate knowledge of the artist and his work glossed in each occasion, and with the honest intention of venturing to present creators and creations using words that are not those of a sales agent or a master of ceremonies, the texts also outline the inventory of a personal sensibility, a cartography of Liaño’s interests are wound together, until they reveal a biographic Arcimboldian portrait in which subjects such as symbol, image and imagination, reality, memory, Giordano Bruno, romantic impulse, the Avant-guards, Dali, the vanitas, the monstrous, mercantilism, the incognito, and knowledge systems combine.

Written with evident delight and freshness, attempting to unite the logic of concepts with the logic of affections, the texts are the fruit of the expectation of sharing the elation that the work gives him and the abundance of reflections that this releases, and they have the rare virtue, for being unusual, of being kind and generous with the reader.

Ignacio Gómez de Liaño (Madrid, 1946) is a philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist, diarist and translator. PhD in Philosophy, he has been a university lecturer of Aesthetic, Philosophy and Sociologic Theory. In a permanent state of creative combustion, he developed a pronounced activity in the field of cutting-edge experimental poetry and explored the possibilities of cybernetic art in the 60s and 70s. Later on would come travels around the world and his long stays in the East. Today, with more than thirty books published, the work of Gómez de Liaño is a landmark in the Spanish panorama, a necessary point of passage and an essential reference.