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)
