Barbara Fluxá. Cultural Landscape Sunken Argusino. (Fragment). 
Combarro Nicholas. Black Series. 
Ángel de la Rubia. Gallery. 
Esther G. Victor MVLB 3RE-Conversion, 2010. 
Up or down? (2010). Acrylic on canvas. 150 x 150 cm. When you have noticed the profound value of Las Meninas or other masterpieces of the space represented -The washing of Tintoretto, the Board of the Philippines of Goya, one can impatient with the presence of the figures who occupy them. Characters and objects importune us, distract us from what we really like to see: the painted space itself, the vibration of light in the atmosphere, the essential loneliness of the stage. Velazquez and Tintoretto obviously not could engage in such contempt, but other artists after they have driven themselves to the royal family and their attendants, or Jesus and his apostles, or have been replaced by other (contingent) people-to enjoy at home the true actor these masterpieces. Goya, on the other hand, the threshold of modernity, made it very clear what he was interested in representing the largest of his paintings: no Fernando VII, remote its vanishing point, or all dispensable directors. I wanted to paint the volume of a large container of air flooded by light, as if the false vacuum outside the supreme manifestation of the painting itself.
In the context of their work, Monica Dixon has dared to take that step. As evidenced by this retrospective, intense maturation of his painting in the last decade not only builds on a growing mastery of technique but, above all in the way she has used to clear the entire pictorial space what has been perceived as anecdotal and contingent. This does not mean in any way that the human figures, footwear, clothing or household items he painted years ago with a devotion worthy of the everyday object at once realistic and still life pop art should be viewed as mere exercises or are now learning rejected in the name of some kind of progress simplistic conception of painting.
the contrary, look back on these pictures and relate them to firm Dixon now to reveal the deep coherence of this painting, his loyalty to the same poetic. If it does not paint those objects rotund, sensual, almost lovingly sobados the use and abuse took their boxes for six or seven years, and if the figures-absorbed loners and often in the same light, rarely inhabit now because the investigation into the essence of reality has shown, in the eyes of the author herself, those reasons you became less and less necessary to paint what he really seem interested, giving the impression that with singular obstinacy and best tools ever wanted to paint all along: the reality, understood as persistence. is, the melancholy of things stay in front of our eyes temporarily. And therefore, the loneliness of things and our own fleeting desolation. Although it has many features in common, and formal devotions Hopper, Warhol- with the work of the so-called English metaphysical, the metaphysics Monica Dixon played in his paintings is of a nature less self-conscious, ironic and full of appointments. Is, without more, the register an elemental awe at the beauty of a reality which, mysteriously, tend to survive. That is survive. And therefore we already somehow excluded.
What has changed over the years are the topics that Dixon traces the mystery and beauty. At first, shoes, clothes, furniture, interior architectural structures heaped almost entirely pictorial space with a flatly proclaiming the opposite of a vanitas Baroque. Things sang "here we are and here we will remain" two-fold: common objects and as objects and painted. Even uninhabited interior, which and opened a spacious decidedly painting, still full of furniture and sound textures that gave flesh to light. But the space has been gaining ground, the role of light that often erupts from the front, widening, filling the table, and the objects and skins of things have finally come out little by little the scene. Just like if it had come to the conclusion that it truly sustainable, the reality will prevail against our evanescence, not the individual things, or the particular configuration of space, but space itself and the light that reveals. Or rather, the space, painted in the form of a light that is defined in the minimum contact forms and the minimum necessary to modulate objects.
At some stages of the investigation, Dixon has also played an inevitable idea: the possibility that reality is a construction. There are inscribed in its original puzzles that deconstructs and reconstructs a single perspective or image that has previously decomposed into concentric sections. But despite the interest of these experiments, which may well be called shattered spaces taking the title of one of its parts, "in recent years dominated by two series in which the artist returned respectfully to construction excellence in painting -Western perspective, and focuses on a technique Classic to feature strongly as difficult to figure out: space, not as mere construction or vacuum, but as a presence. It does show in parallel with a touch of high purity, light-filled interiors (and backlit, shadowing, which tends to overflow the table, to accumulate in the viewer) and describing also the place from which the light: exterior. What's out? Essentially the same: more space, more air, more light, but overflowing into infinity. Tapeworms architectures displayed crushed under a luminous atmosphere, without taint of cloud in Nortemérica hopperianos rural landscapes seem to highlight what human constructions the precarious under the enduring majesty of space and sky.
And yet, neither those inside and those landscapes are areas completely alone. The lives, obviously, that we wanted to paint Goya in Board of the Philippines: the fullness, the reality of the painting itself. And also, incidentally, our gaze. Although only a passing glance absorbed.
Lancaster PA No. 2 (2009). Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 100 cm. If the viewer has a little time, and if you can afford to do so in one fell swoop perhaps it is worth the travel: go-no matter the order-to monographic of Miguel Macaya (Santander, 1964) in the Sala de Arte Van Dyck of Gijón and then come up lasted House Art Center to see Mieres The voice of the silent (the object in space), the review of the last years of work by Monica Dixon (Camden, New Jersey, 1971).
Naturally, each exhibition has its own personality, quality and substance, and can and should be considered in their own worth, but the trip will, without losing the deep mystery that captures each of them, enjoy two versions complementary but closely allied to that which too generally figuration is called . And note, incidentally, the limits of a term that is often simplistically equated with realism and opposition in an equally simplistic to abstraction. Because, in short, Macaya displays in his work the overwhelming dominance of the objects represented as abstractions, absolutely abstracted pictorial presence any world and consume Dixon in his real Trek become increasingly so charged in object-tempts Kant's terminology in condition of all representation. And all to conclude that in both cases, Macaya and Dixon, objects and space are, first of all excuses to indulge in a passionate practice of painting as such a picture, regardless of what one is representing her.
Untitled. Oil on board. 122 x 122 cm.
Those who have followed the path established Macaya will find themselves at the individual family in Gijon, who is not, likely will feel equally disturbed and baffled by how assimilated the great English tradition, the Golden Age Goya- and some period of the century painting contemporary metabolism. Horses, zebras, dogs, strange bipedal birds, still life reduced to a minimum, gravid female nudes of carnality and hieratic and characteristic bullfighters appear as usual in the Cantabrian resolved through technical expertise in the consummation of the trade that does not detract one iota of tremor : the vibration of the execution itself, which is recorded almost as a diffuse form of expressionism and the mysterious vibration of painted objects, whose firmness never hid this ambiguous condition.
is not, therefore, a trompe-l'oeil reiteration of what you see outside the box, but the invocation by beings whose painting essence is exactly that-be painting, "and therefore seem to be so precarious, always ready to dilute their ways in what, after all they are: pure painting. It makes up dark or neutral funds in floating apart from any reality that is not yours.
Meanwhile, Monica Dixon invited, from the title, to read the work of his later years in Mieres reviewing a reverse trip, "the object into space." In it, the concentration almost Franciscan thorough and the powerful presence of small beings and banal objects has been gradually expanding to cover the space in which they are embedded, but, significantly, slowly expelling any trace of the same beings and objects. Domestic interiors, where they still appeared furniture, materials, textures on the surfaces of which Dixon explored the effects of an inverted backlight, have been becoming increasingly neutral scenarios, in which only include the minimum elements to define space and light-understood in every sense of the word as grounds of his painting, and treated as realities increasingly abstract and absolute, but still configured with the features of a recognizable reality, no matter if it's in a hallway or impersonal and uninhabited room that seem to refer, to scale, large spaces Velazquez, the Washing Tintoretto of Goya or the Board of the Philippines , or taste of the landscapes hopperiano rescued from the memory of his native America, where a farm, a barn or silo appear merely isolated as references to compare the absolute space that swallows.
(New Spain, 03/10/1911)
"You can regard these paintings as a download, in every sense of the word I can think of." From its very title, download, José Piñar (Granada, 1967) invites the close of the exhibition so that these days displayed in the gallery Lola Orato Oviedo. The first senses that occur to the viewer have to do, of course, the most common meanings of the word, so that from the beginning, tends to regard the outbreak Piñar controlled paint room out in the Dark Street plastic as the testimony of some release or waiver, of a decision-also alleviates any sense of the word some kind of load. But there is much less common meanings to those that can directly target these downloads of Granada painter. For example, this form of Cuban music is a bewildering live improvisation and made popular musicians like Cachao. And even a meaning again that the Asturian-particularly of Cangas del Narcea, know very well: the simultaneous firing, festive and overwhelming, a good number of fireworks.
papers
Download has a lot of these last two meanings, in the noblest sense of improvisatory or the fireworks: one domain shows a dazzling and colorful instrument is known by heart, and a joyous spectacular light and color obtained through the release of certain energies. For those who know the history of Piñar-one of the most English exponents of the personal relevance of painting as a fully contemporary language, "the individual will probably Lola Orato as a sort of compendium of what has been done in previous exhibitions, and at the time as well as a brash personal entertainment, however, no viewer's eyes lost none of its power and eloquence.
Perhaps the best example of this are the leaflets that transpose the format found in the same lightness and fluidity of small watercolor in which they are based, and in which the look can be found in both with a real roller coaster tracks and winding as vigorous and stable structures, funds black lines crossed by pristine white or colored pools sometimes floating like liquid or gaseous masses on -landscapes-places that deserve the name itself as such.
In short, the painting of José Piñar in Download contains and arouses all their unmistakeable features: technical skill in controlling the color and brightness, drawing on a large scale and the vagaries of the spot; the coexistence of the highly personal constructed with the gesture, the rigorous composition, overlapping planes and wealth of the transparencies, the game translation of the codes of the digital image in any of formats, the venerable paint codes no longer purely painting at any time ... But all this served on this occasion by an execution, or that is the impression that airs on the final effect, in which improvisation prevails over the control and in which as in the greats of jazz and Cuban discharge what is perceived is a direct invitation to enjoy surround both the artist and the recipient of his art. And, for the first, it marks a development of the first order for their skills and their instruments.
(New Spain, 03/03/1911)
