SERGIO CALVO. ‘Pinturas’

Sergio Calvo González (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1920-2010) was a self-taught and versatile artist. He was a painter, a stage designer and a project designer, among others. A person full of life and prone to reflection, a lover of freedom and modernity.

As a child, he received his first drawing and painting classes at the Municipal School of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and also attended the Luján Pérez School as an apprentice for six months when he was barely twelve.

His meeting with Néstor Martín Fernández de la Torre in 1937 marked both his artistic and his vital trajectory. The famous modernist artist persuaded him to quit school and work alongside him, devoting himself fully to artistic creation.

Calvo collaborated in his master’s studio until a year after his death, taking on influences from both his symbolist work and Nestorian tipismo, a distinctive interpretation and reinvention of costumbrismo, folklore and the Canarian landscape.

In 1946-1947, he travelled around Europe, witnessing the consequences of the devastation caused by the Second World War, an experience that would leave a lasting mark on his most personal and expressionist painting. He was also influenced by his reading of Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses.

From the 1940s to the 1960s he combined the development of a painting oeuvre characterized by costumbrismowith a picturesque aesthetic typical from the works of Néstor Martín Fernández de la Torre —usually commissioned by private customers— with much more intimate, reflective and expressionist works, formalised from influences and tributes to the history of great painting.

Sergio Calvo stood out and was widely known as a stage designer for zarzuelas, operas and plays, which he carried out both at the Teatro Pérez Galdós and at the Teatro Cuyás in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Also notable are his stage designs for the mass-attended operas represented in the Estadio Insular in the 1970s.

Among the works in this exhibition, together with Muerte (1939), firmly installed in the symbolism typical of Néstor Martín Fernández de la Torre, and the mythological–tipista recreation of his study for the lost mural of Las harimaguadas, from the 1960s, the fundamental nucleus of his paintings stands out in confluence with Ortega’s thought on the disappearance of the individual subsumed in alienated, uncritical and “masses” without a will of their own. It is his essential Tetralogy of the Masses: Éxodo, Masa Estática, Masa en Tensión and Energética. 

It is an honour for the CAAM to host the exhibition of this important donation of works by the artist Sergio Calvo to the Museo de Bellas Artes, MUBEA, of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, thanks to the generosity of the Calvo Hernández family.

Orlando Britto Jinorio
CAAM Artistic Director