Universitat de València

In his dual role of artist and botanist, we took Gerardo Stübing painting as a game of complicity between a scientist and an artist. A game in which the painting’s poetic is not disturbed by science, but slightly catalyzed, inspired by taxonomy and then abandoned it to inspiration. A game in which the scientist provides an empirical knowledge that by brush in hand

becomes passion, abstraction, texture and fractality.

These words worked as a metaphor on the duality of Gerardo Stübing (artist and scientist),

the knowledge of the underlying truth after the colourist and aesthetic vocation of his brush-strokes exceeding this speech. Embarked on this painting career as part of a dynamic artistic work, always speculative and researcher, it seems logical that sooner or later Gerardo had

had the need to seek other borders to keep on growing as a painter. And in the field of botanical a name comes almost as a natural choice if you seek a "deus ex machina" of Stübing’s work: the drawings by the Valencian botanist Antonio José Cavanilles. Pioneer of the classification and inventory of flora, one of the few enlightened given by the Valencian Eighteenth Century, Cavanilles is, most of all, a key figure in the collective imagination of our land. His observations and drawings of Valencian flora are reference and revered works by almost every town, since it is part of its sentimental story and certainly as a documentary treasure. Nearly from a metaphysical point of view, we can say that Cavanilles is an image of what we Valencians may become, or perhaps what we wanted to be.

In short, one path, two looks.