Armando

Armando (Gijón,1928-2002) was a self-taught artist from Asturias who graduated as an industrial and chemical engineer. Brought up during the Civil War without a mother or a father figure, he was very close to his older brother, who opened an art gallery in the city of Gijón. At the age of 28 he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which, years later, made it impossible for him to return to his post in the steel mill where he worked. He was given a disability pension which allowed him to dedicate more time to his two main passions: painting and music. Up until this point, his artistic interests had focused on natural landscapes, depictions of secular architecture and still lifes. Circumscribed to the local Asturian sphere, from 1958 he will began to exhibit individually in spaces such as the Ateneo de Gijón, showrooms such as Altamira, Galería Benedet or the Tassili Gallery, the latter two in Oviedo.

Subjected to electroshock treatment and questionable psychiatric therapies like insulin coma therapy, Armando started to distort the representational field which he had stuck to as a figurative painter, simplifying the forms to the most basic levels of painting. Between the late-1950s and the 90s, this broad-ranging body of work incorporated the presence of man in the world as a central reference: compassion between humans, protection of the environment and animals as well as our relationship with other beings in the galaxy. While it is true that many of his personal notes and sketchpads speak of revelations of superior beings who warn him about impending world catastrophes, his painting is circumscribed to the purely descriptive scope of celestial phenomena, almost like a natural historian. These phenomena reside in an area of unsayability in which we will never know for sure whether they are stars, planets or moons, or whether what looks like a flying object is, in fact, the product of human engineering, fantastic imagination or extra-terrestrial intelligence.