Xaime Cabanas

XAIME CABANAS (A Coruña, 1953- 2013).
"Sacred Heart", 1996.
Oil on paper.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 40 x 29 cm; 64 x 53 cm (frame).

Considered as the protagonist of the renovation of plastic art in Galicia, Xaime Cabanas began his artistic career in the seventies. He was an active member of groups such as A Sisga, A Carón and A Galga, which promoted an alternative way of life and fought to escape the immobility in which the Galician cultural scene seemed to be immersed at that time. The painter from A Coruña was one of the 23 artists who, in 1980, participated in an exhibition in Baiona that was key to the birth of the Atlántica movement, a period that Xaime Cabanas remembered, according to Xavier Seoane in the volume Cabanas MMI, as "marvelous, radiant". In the mid-1980s, in A Coruña, he takes up again the initiatives aimed at artistic stimulation with the GrupOrzán collective. The artist explores various plastic worlds, mainly abstract, which will dominate his work. After an accident in 1987 that kept him hospitalized for a long time and led him to create art with a medieval influence, his style took a turn towards American expressionism on the way to abstract conceptualism, an abstract line that does not exclude figurative references in his compositions, characterized by ancestral and autobiographical codes.