Mateo Orduña Castellano (1915-1989) - Bodegón

He was born in a village of the municipality of Almoster la Real (Huelva), in a family of modest means. Awarded a scholarship by the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, he moved in 1932 to Huelva to enter the School of Fine Arts of Huelva, led by the Malaga-born painter José Fernández Alvarado, then director of the City’s Museum of Fine Arts. With Fernández Alvarado’s death in 1935, the Academy was also lost, along with the young Orduña’s hopes, despite the efforts to keep the continuity by Brunt until 1936, and later by Pedro Gómez and Enrique García Orta. From then on, Orduña faced life amid the dramatic events that clouded Spain. After the Civil War and leaving office work behind, he pursued painting professionally.
In 1942 he began to taste success in the exhibition Art and Rest, winning the first prize. From 1944 he exhibited in Huelva, Seville, Bilbao and Huesca: Orduña abandoned the rigor of classical painting, with a seventies air, austere, as well as his devotion to the realistic teachings of his master Fernández Alvarado, to dive into freedom of impressionism, in the line of Sorolla.
The idea of travel, of conquering worlds and getting to know — a matter not easy in postwar Huelva — led to a short but intense period of constant searching, of human and artistic definition. Between 1949 and 1953 Orduña defined his pictorial meaning through a vibrant spectacle of light and color, the matrix of his work, and a great expressive force with a clear memory of the last Goya.
For twenty years, a period spanning from 1954 to 1974, his mature, personal style took shape. After exhibitions in Gijón, Madrid, Tangier, Tetouan, Gibraltar, Jerez, Seville and Barcelona, with great critical and public success, Orduña returned to Huelva with the status of a great painter, and thus with the recognition of his society, which helped him be regarded as the “painter of Huelva,” above names like Pedro Gómez, García Vázquez, Labrador, Vázquez Díaz or Caballero.
He traveled to Switzerland, where he encountered the works of Vieira da Silva and Nicolas Staël, and to Italy, a country where he resided for several months. In 1965 he went to New York, and did not return until 1968, after a brief exhibition hiatus in Puerto Rico. This extensive period was characterized by a deeply interiorized approach to judging and viewing nature and people, where everything was governed by an aggressive, rough and feverish yet very elegant composition, of clear expressive evolution, bordering on abstraction at times.
From 1973 his production filled with depth and stillness, and he abandoned the plastic and vital inquietudes of yesteryear. At this stage the influence of Cézanne and the more concrete Vázquez Díaz is evident, although at certain moments the painter from Huelva seeks new plastic concerns ranging from Sevillian poetic realism to surreal meta-realism.
With his death, the art of Huelva lost perhaps its most restless and unpredictable painter. He translated nearly all plastic languages of the first half of the 20th century without injuring the representation of objects and their personal coloristic and compositional traces.