Philipp Fröhlich «Cabeza fuera del agua»

Juan Silió Gallery presents Cabeza fuera del agua, the first exhibition at Santander by the artist Philipp Fröhlich (Schweinfurt, Germany, 1975), showcasing works created between 2019 and 2023.

Fröhlich defends painting against other means of image-making, though he does not do so in a traditional way. The themes of his works are based on models he first creates in his studio, inspired by texts of various kinds or by word-image associations. In his paintings, the scenes appear with a very distinctive veiled blurriness that seems to speak to us of the complexity inherent in what we call ‘truth’ and its relationship with the fantastical, resulting in enigmatic and mysterious scenes.

 

NONE OF THIS REALLY HAPPENED

From fantasy one might, naively, expect great things. If we are to invent, we might as well choose heroes over fops, palaces over huts. Yet there are great masters who dissent from such reasonable intuition. Verdi, mind you, spent three years of his old age setting to music the life of a loser. The opera, as you know, recounts one of the adventures of the knight Falstaff—an elderly, spendthrift, drunken, and paunchy man who attempts to seduce two ladies with a romantic purpose: to settle his considerable debts with both their dowries. Among the many tensions contained in this apparently banal comedy, I would like to single out one: that Verdi chose to crown his most modern composition with a ten-voice fugue. It unfolds like this: after being deceived by his victims, Sir John turns toward the audience and snaps, “Tutto nel mondo è burla.” Which is to say, life is a joke, and we’ve all been had.

Even in Verdi’s youth, the fugue was already an old story. It was invented in the late 1500s and reached its height during the Baroque. Its name comes from the effect it produces: the melodies seem to chase one another in a flight so intricate that the fugitive and the hunter become indistinguishable. The artifice—tender, like all of them—nonetheless requires extraordinary skill, for the lightness of these sounds chasing each other through the air rests on a most calculated scheme; the slightest error in transposition would bring the whole house of cards down. Verdi knew this and plays with it: the festive jingle of the operatic finale grows into a crescendo that, in a flash, turns dissonant. (Have we been swindled? Was all that machinery only meant to undo us?) “Tutti gabbati,” Falstaff tells us, looking us in the eye. A silence follows. “All deceived,” replies the chorus softly, as if realizing it at last. And suddenly, the jubilation returns.

“They’re not real scenes; I paint them from models,” Philipp Fröhlich admitted to me in his Brussels studio. The confession proves illuminating: I don’t believe Jacques-Louis David witnessed the Oath of the Horatii, nor John Martin the Fall of Babylon, though there is no record to that effect. We tolerate without alarm that artists invent the great occasions of history, but it unsettles us when someone composes, with figurines and backdrops, an insignificant scene: a few cats licking their lips in the glow of a television; a pigeon landing, out of focus, on a patch of mud.

It’s worth remembering that the history of painting began with two trifles: a bunch of grapes and a curtain. Also with two deceits: first they fooled the birds, then the other painter. The trick rested on exquisitely refined details, meticulously arranged to mislead the eye. One imagines poor Zeuxis scratching with his fingers at the curtain painted by Parrhasius and turning toward the agora gathered there. “Tutti gabbati.” After an instant of astonishment, everyone—surely—burst into laughter.

Joaquín Jesús Sánchez, 2025.