Eusebio Sempere (Onil 1923-1985) sculptor, painter and graphic artist, is the most international artist in the Alicante artistic panorama and one of the most genuine representatives of geometric abstraction and optical and kinetic tendencies. After studying at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts, he moved to Paris in 1949, where he became acquainted with the work of authors such as Mondrian, Kandinsky, Vasarely, Arp, Klee and Picasso and where he interacted with the most important artists of the time. During that period, he would abandon figuration and begin his journey through geometric art, developing two very important series: the "gouaches on cardboard" and the "luminous reliefs". In the gouaches he sought the creation of his own artistic alphabet and established the foundations of his plastic language and all his subsequent concerns. They are simple, emotional and naive works that become increasingly complex in a growing interest in volume, depth and movement. The "luminous reliefs" are resolved in three-dimensional version through a wooden box with different planes illuminated by means of a small electric motor and became the main contribution to the optical and kinetic movement of the Alicante artist.
To this series of experimental works belongs the Mobile Luminous Relief of 1959, Alicante Provincial Council collection, a complex work where painted wooden and plastic planes are assembled, which is illuminated alternately through a basic electrical system, and which emerges as a response to a growing interest in three-dimensional work, in volume and depth, developed throughout the 1950s. Sempere uses the three dimensions to capture light, but not a poetic light that until now emerged from the painting itself, but electric light, that which is installed through light bulbs, cables, sockets, resistors, rheostats and alternations. Light was the inescapable excuse for volume.
Eusebio Sempere and Abel Martín returned to Spain in 1960, settling in Madrid where they had friends who promised them help, collaborations and projects. Sempere found himself in an artistic environment dominated by the most material informalism and realistic figuration. And in his own creation he introduced a change in the support of his work: cardboard was replaced by wood, a hard and resistant surface that, properly prepared by Abel Martín, would be the best support for the gouache lines drawn with ruling pens. Above that background, gestural, thick and impasto, the mathematical regularity of some lines recalls the chosen path: geometric abstraction.
Virtual Rotatory Movement, 1969 and Division of Blue Circles, 1976, Alicante Provincial Council collection, both executed using the gouache on panel technique belong to this period and to these aesthetic concerns, although more refined. The material backgrounds have disappeared and in vibrant almost black blue colors or in pinkish and almost violet blues, Sempere manages to establish a suggestive geometric composition structured in squares. The works of this period will be increasingly perfected in execution, with the lines becoming finer and cleaner, of mathematical regularity, and the color degrading, his painting becoming more spiritual, almost mystical, with subtle and ethereal light effects.
