Vanguards have also died and there are philosophers who proclaim the funerals of art as a language. The King has died. God save the King! In this attitude of uncertainties, where we can only find the real truth in some brown eyes and some dusks, I have to exalt a panegyric for my friend Sese's engravings.

By virtue of this friendship, since several years ago, my view has to be necessarily a bit mannered. Sesé is like a Greek youth and his workshops, Mas de Flors and Mas de Cucala, are made of red sandstone and stone, terraced orchards where the millennial roots of olive trees, carob trees and almonds, copulate with our mother earth. Can there be any other trees more Neoplatonic and Epicurean? Sesé could be one of Dionysius' priest under the Mediterranean sun, which rouses the alliterative and monocord shout of the cicada. Sesé, from Mas de Flors; Sesé from the dry land; Sesé, Paloma's lover; Sesé of the autumns whose calendar is marked by thrushes with poultry breasts in oil and Saffron Milk-caps of inflamed blood, as a Greek wine.

Sesé is young. His youth, as belonging to his generation, could have made of him a follower of that fierce udder that the Mediterranean impressionist painting used to be. Those flaring lights Sorolla discovered and still continue up to now with mediocre works for Kitsch-folk-decorated establishments. But Sesé paints neither venerable olive trees nor light nymphs with round hips frolicking at the seaside of a metaphorical sea.

The Mediterranean, Manuel Vicent stated, is a dead sea. It has been reduced to a mental concept. Different ideas are selfsighteousness and beating around the bush. Because of his age, Sesé belongs to a group of youths who have seen dust falling on the fly-shitted canvas of the Olot and Valencienne schools, painting of easel that produced landscapes of easy sensationalism. Bonne nuit, Monsieur Courbet! Sesé, like other young contemporary painters from Castelló, whose names I omit not to hurt sensitive sensitivities with grateful bellies, has drunk in universal goblets and created his own Oedipus language. He has known how to supplant father and enrich himself during that personal travel to Ithaca along painting, ceramics and engraving.

Sesé does not let concessions and he has recovered, since five years ago, the noble craft of engraving for the universal art field from which we do not know, as the philosophers mentioned, wether it is a language or what.

Engraving, let's say clearly, has been always painting and drawing poor brother. Engraving, raised to the high point by Dürer or Holbein, was the poor companion of Gutemberg's mobile types. Only when the photographic illustration entered the heart of bound books, the artist brandished the graver or the acids as arms filled of future and there they remained for posterity: the engravings and etchings made by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Edward Munch...

Once the literary slavery of engraving was abolished, engraving has been considered one of the most interesting fields in art investigation: it is an appealing temptation enlarging the artist experimental field, making possible a more extensive spread for his production, and increasing his creative versatility by means of resources and techniques different from usual. Sesé understood it soon and without renouncing oil and ceramics, where he has obtained noteworthy results, he has centred around his engraving craft. Sesé engraves, makes his own papers, chooses his inks and avoids The Mediterranean as far as concept and trade are concerned. Don't look for a prophet-in-his-land Sesé. Sesé is a world dweller and you could see him in Stockholm, Neuchâtel, Evian, Düsseldorf, Borriol or Amsterdam. Sesé is as a starling that steals you olives and takes them away moved by a northern impulse.

For that reason he is neither a provincial artist nor local. He does not develop the grateful and peasant ego in this coastline somebody called the "Levante feliz" or the Hesperides garden.

This catalogue of his engravings made in the last years shows the way Sesé has evolved in his craft. In the first engravings he creates those terrible, stormy seascapes on the flax cellulose. They are special seascapes: pieces of waves breaking against the watcher's retina. However, these seascapes he transferred from canvas to paper are like Boticelli's experiment consisting of throwing a pigment-soaked sponge against a wall and getting splendid results. Sesé's engravings share that Renaissance Neoplatonism, without abandoning the figurative art as an embryo or omphalos of the concept expressed on the plates.

One of Sesé's engravings can be a landscape or a pan with snails, but if you get into the soul of the piece you will find out a colourful fractalization that holds an extensive area of abstract worlds, less prosaic and much more revealing than the figurative concept expressed. So, don't look at those engravings with the critic's slow-witted eye that moves away from the picture to have a global view of the work. Flatten your cultivated noses against the paper. It is not necessary to clean your mucous membranes before. The work will not be damaged, it is made of a thick flax chemical paste, and you will be allowed to lean out of those beautiful wells that are Sesé's abstract bipolar worlds.

Look, look, unfocus some fragments and look at others. Scrutinize, dissect his engravings, steal them their fire. Fire was made to be stolen by Prometheus, by people like you. There are not any more flowers, there are not any more still lifes, there are not any more pans, lilies, prickly pears, quinces, leaves ... If you succeed in discovering just one of Sesé's secret worlds you will enter the heart of the nebula and you will feel protected by the whole universe. You will feel old and babies at the same time. As the last passage in Arthur C. Clark's novel "2001: A Space Odyssey," the world will be yours and, paradoxically you will not know what to do with it.

Flax, carborundum, mother-of-pearl, metal filing, golden and silvered inks, broken ship hulls, paint for sports cars... The apparent simplicity of Sesé's engravings holds a complex elaboration, in which it is sometimes necessary as many as eighteen times passing under the etching press. Intaglio is a game for children when Sesé plans to get several volumes on the same paper. The blowlamp opens holes and creates an uneven area on a seemingly flat and inert surface, as paper is.

This thick flax paper, like a whitewash wall, is a receptive lover that absorbs the creative semen from the poet-artist Sesé and proclaims his paternity flaring with colour.

Consequently, Sesé is not Aristotelian estricto sensu , he does not look for a mimesis of reality. He recreates it with the mere entertainment of a fish, some snails or a flower. Isn't that an approach to reality without a priori prejudices?

Sesé, from Mas de Flors; Sesé from the dry land; Sesé, Paloma's lover; Sesé of the autumns, whose calendar is marked by thrushes with poultry breasts in oil and Saffron Milk-caps of inflamed blood, as a Greek wine. Sometimes we sit under a fig-tree to behold the dusk made of live coal and the blue from the horizon. A breeze blows and the first star lights up. The wine is cool and it has amphora dregs. The last blackbird sings while Joan Ripollés and Manuel Vicent officiate as demiurges. We ignore if we are 'angels' or 'neophytes' perhaps the secret of happiness lies on that doubt.

©Antoni Albalat
Summer 95 Translated from Spanish by María Victòria Oliver Guasp

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