Luis Macias

Palma Mallorca, 1962

Lives and works in New York

Macias has his roots in the so-called post-pop movement in Spain, depicting vividly colorful, abstract geometry. His early work can be read as a reformulation or assimilation of existing language from the culture of mass media. His works absorbs the formal pieces of an identifiable visual system, to bring its essential typologies together in a generic expression. They can be read as a semi-abstract reduction of the forms of everyday life. Several of Macias’ works apply the technique of interlocking figure and background, leading to the creation of double images, often not visible at first.

In recent years, Macias has been portraying imaginative characters in renderings that are still very colorful, but on the contrary carry grotesque and haunting features. They seem like they are dissolving, falling apart, but at the same time they convey their revulsion with an almost humoristic outrageousness; simple and iconographic, but also comic and personal.

Macias is interested in the artists role in fixing the forms of contemporary culture in the works; drawing attention to the painting, in his 2D- like figuration in his early days and pointing the mirror back towards the public in his confronting portraits.