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

exceed 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:

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 a transcript of what we Valencians may

become, or perhaps what we wanted to be.

In short, one path, two looks