In “FFFF,” his third solo show at Galería Erhardt Flórez, painter Guillermo Pfaff shows a clear shift in strategy. In previous exhibitions, the artist explored the pictorial possibilities of imperfection and spontaneity in emphatic paintings of monochrome geometric shapes. The immediacy and disorientingly naive appearance of his canvases revealed the influence of Sean Scully, in whose Barcelona studio Pfaff once worked as an assistant.
Both the conceptual and the technical approach have changed significantly in the large-format series “Minimum White” and “Maximum White” (all works 2023), four examples of which occupy the main room of the gallery: sober, sparse expanses that exploit the chromatic possibilities of a repertoire of abstract shapes in different shades of gray, combined as a sort of private alphabet in different arrangements over raw canvas. Pfaff foregrounds the graphic element by integrating his own last name—quizzical for Spanish speakers, a challenge underscored by the exhibition title—into the compositions.
In these works, the artist abandons his previous linear and streamlined geometry and, in parts of the picture plane, allows corrections and pentimenti to suggest organic shapes still in flux. The tongue-in-cheek irony implicit in this narrative of the pictorial gesture, with all its deceit and its almost cartoonish clumsiness, recalls the work of Philip Guston.
Color reappears in the smaller “Sampled Paintings,” which nod to the expressionist approach of important painters of the Spanish abstract tradition of the mid-twentieth century, such as Esteban Vicente, José Guerrero, or, to a lesser extent, Gustavo Torner. These are thoughtful, elegant, and concise images, able to convey with minimal means the expressive maturity Pfaff now possesses.
— Javier Montes
