Luís González Robles, Seville, 1996

In art terminology the concepts of REALISM and REALITY are not only considered to encompass the whole of all natural entities, but also of all spiritual beings and anything else that may in some way be considered to enjoy a certain type or level of existence.

Realism or Reality must be considered to be transcendental in the plastic message of any work of art, appearing from different yet complementary perspectives, their procedures, representational in nature, being individually objective, that is, impassionate, static, contrasting what is real with what is static. It is in these ideas that we find the true roots of the great Spanish art of the XVI and XVII centuries.

EUFEMIANO drew from this inheritance, with almost mystical faithfulness, in all of his consistent work, in which all that is real consistently appears as a plastic message. His idealist voice emanates strongly from his works with a certain roughness, but also with the singular masculine integrity of a consummate professional. The procedure he uses is absolutely realist, even where the composition may be fanciful in a reflection of the artist's mood in respect of Reality, calmly and faithfully updating his silent and intimate style. A personal style that EUFEMIANO, with stoicism and withdrawn from the clamour of life's everyday battles, discovers with passionate illusion in his fertile struggle, revealing this dramaticism through his figures and objects. Such figures were hieratic, of a startling realism, full of subtleties that reflect faithfulness to his personal expressionist language of a deeply tragic nature, in the purest and most honest spirit of the great painter from Seville, Valdés Leal.

With his restless temperament always in search of new plastic investigations, EUFEMIANO enrols in the School of Fine Arts of Madrid for a course in Chalcographic Engraving. This experience allowed him to make positive artistic discoveries that would serve to round off his already solid career path, with the happy realisation of a series of etchings and lithographs that corroborate his domination of line and his knowledge of the deeply dramatic Goyesque contrasts. As the Director of the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid I had the satisfaction of installing in the Museum, in 1973, the works that came from being exhibited at the Florence Biennial (Italy), where he had just received the gold medal in the competition, and in 1975 I selected him with a Special Room at the Spanish Pavilion of the International Art Biennial of San Paulo (Brazil).