Camilo José Cela

Camilo José Cela

The arrow flies clean…

The arrow flies clean, certain and serene, and is as much the symbol of war as that of love; Saint Sebastian was killed by arrows and on the trunk of the oak tree the lovers engrave their initials under the silhouette of a heart pierced by a wounding and compromising arrow.

Carrero dreams of peace and his painting exudes harmony and peace because it is the same melodic hope in leather seen in the measured light of the soul in diaphanous and graphic balance of the most sapient stroke guessed.

Some time ago I wrote some verses in praise of two painters -Mampaso and Picasso- and starting from Neruda’s words, I closed my eyes to confess my guilt:

“I must say it with the thinnest

word not yet born from my mouth:

in the fountains of God’s memory

the tenebrous oblivion dwells”.

That oblivion in the dark, that forgetfulness in darkness, is also love because, for greater lesson and evidence, at the bottom of everything there is only love flying from star to star and from star to heart.

In the deepest and most hidden part of J. Carrero’s painting, love beats with a delightfully cruel pulse, pointing out all that we love and admire: the smooth skin of women, the artistic old age, ceramics, the veiny, caressing and fleshy texture of fruit.

Carrero is a classic that jumps over academies and customs because, locked alone with his solitude, his magic and his angelic bitterness, he manages to paint the world naked and first hand.

And with the wisest of all possible innocence, that of the artist who only agrees with the truth, never with angels or the devil, and who surrenders only to the swift and mature truth of light and color.

Camilo José Cela,
Nobel Prize in Literature.
Madrid, January 1996