Néstor Reencountered

The exhibition Néstor Reencountered puts forward a retrospective re-reading of the figure of Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1887–1938), an artist from the Canary Islands who cultivated myriad disciplines. From painting and murals to theatre sets and wardrobes for eminent figures such as Manuel de Falla and Antonia Mercé y Luque, La Argentina, the show retrieves over a hundred pieces which are relatively unknown outside the island.

Known as Néstor, he travelled through the languages of modernism, decadentism and symbolism, developing a body of work with a sensuality, traversed by a profound fascination with androgynous bodies, that challenged the most conservative moral standards of his era.

Néstor was born into a wealthy family from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1887. In Barcelona in 1907 he would embark upon a fertile period as he frequented modernist circles, cemented friendships with Mariano Andreu, Laura Albéniz and Ismael Smith and held his first solo exhibition in Sala Parés (1909), earning acclaim from distinguished critics such as Eugenio D’Ors.

In 1913 he moved to Madrid, where he came into contact with Valle-Inclán, Federico García Lorca and with a Dalí who was fascinated with the proto-Surrealist boldness of his work. He also visited London, Paris and Brussels, where he felt the cultural and aesthetic impact of Pre-Raphaelite painting and artists such as James Whistler, Gustave Moreau and Franz von Stuck.

In 1924 in Madrid, he displayed the first pieces from his unique series, which would run centrally through his work, Poema del Atlántico (Poem of the Atlantic) and Poema de la Tierra (Poem of the Earth). As part of an ambitious project devoted to the elements, and cut short by his untimely death in 1938, these epic series of large-scale paintings reflect his aesthetic ideas on the fusion of male and female bodies. The compositions are laden with baroque elements and fantasy, integrating with great dexterity some of the components of the Canary Island’s flora and fauna. Moreover, suffused with a burgeoning and personal Surrealism, they also incorporate the esoteric principles of masonry and occultism, core elements in Néstor’s life and artistic language.

Upon returning to his native city in 1934, he worked to promote the Canary Islands’ culture and identity and created the concept of “tipismo”, or localness, as a large project encompassing landmarks such as the design and construction of the Parador de Tejeda or the series of landscape works entitled Visiones de Gran Canaria (Visions of Gran Canaria, 1928–1934). These pieces married the bold perspectives of New Objectivity with an idealised view of the native landscapes of the Canary Islands.