Tag Archives: pintor

Lima, Perú (1992). Lives and Works between London and Madrid.

 

 

 

His work moves between painting, installation and public intervention, his research seeks a horizontal display of critical observations based on extensive documentary work. Daniel de la Barra tells us about the crisis of looking at nature, the representation of the landscape as an extractive process and the points of friction that exist between image, history and modernity. His multidisciplinary work gives us the opportunity to investigate the colonial conflicts that have relegated nature to a subaltern space of exploitation and domination and compose an exercise in countervisuality that reflects, from a global perspective, on the representation of the landscape as an extractive and exercise of power.

 

His work materializes in anti-landscape exercises through socio-environmental violence against neo-extractivism through a political and historical journey, reminiscent of botanical expeditions that reinforce ways of looking at the natural; like a landscape of conquest.

During 2022 he was an artist in residence at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (Italy), in addition to presenting his individual exhibitions at the Joan Prats Gallery (Barcelona) where he received the Collezione Taurisano Award for best exhibition, Ginsberg Gallery (Lima) and at the Central Museum of Lima as part of the exhibition of finalists for the XII National Painting Award. He has also exhibited individually this year at Frieze London and has received the grant as a new resident artist at the Delfina Foundation (London) and the Fundació Miró and Casa Velázquez Grant in Madrid for 2023.

 

In 2021 he developed the project “This is not a landscape. Episode II” at Homesession as part of its INVITED program and received the Catalonia Youth Art Award (Sala d’Art Jove) for publishing his book “Real Expedición Botánica” in collaboration with the Lo Pati Contemporary Art Center (Amposta) and La Panera (Lleida). He also did a residency at La Fabrique (French Alliance in Lima, Peru). In 2020 he was selected as a resident artist at Homesession (Barcelona) where he developed his project “This is not a landscape”. He exhibited “Desired Landscapes” at Arts Santa Mónica, “Considerations of the Modern City” at La Bienal de Amposta (Lo Pati Center d’Art) and his project “Subversion: Inhabiting Ruins” at El Born CCM (Barcelona). He did a residency at the Piramidon Center d’art Contemporani during 2019 and carried out several projects such as “Searching for Paititi”, Espai SubSòl, for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, “Desired Landscapes” Escola de Estiu Walter Benjamin, Portbou or “Pateras Carnaval – Well-being trips” for Luminaria 04, Madrid. In 2018 he received a scholarship at The Nerdrum School (Sweden). He also obtained the La Escocesa (Barcelona) Research Grant in 2018 and 2019, the 2019 Art Jove Award (Sala d’Art Jove), exhibiting at the Sala d’Art Jove. That same year he received the IdeaBorn International Prize and was a finalist for the Ricard Camí Painting Prize (C.C.Terrassa). In Peru, in recent years, he has been a finalist for both the ICPNA National Contemporary Art Award and the National Painting Award (MUCEN), exhibiting at the Central Museum of Lima and the Juan Pardo Hereen Gallery.

 

Badalona, ​​1991

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana expresses himself mainly through drawing and painting, although his approach to creation has, at times, certain similarities with the literary essay.

 

His work processes are usually of a very long duration. He formalizes his aesthetic investigations mainly in large formats, charcoal canvases, epic scenes in oil but also miniatures on glass.

 

Marcel Rubio Juliana’s work is characterized by his interest in classical references: Renaissance painting, sculpture and Italian architecture. He produces an iconography resulting from the natural observation of both human and animal models that runs through all his canvases. Marcel is not afraid to face great themes such as love, death, resurrection, however, elements of everyday life or popular culture can always appear in his paintings.

 

From the allegory, which ironically includes contemporary grotesque representations, in his own words, his work is built around a single purpose: “elevate the spirit.”

Soñé que revelabas (Madeira), 2019

Opening: 10.10.2019,  7pm

 

Friday October 11, 6.30pm, talk between Juan Uslé and curator Javier Sánchez Martínez

 

The title of the new exhibition by Juan Uslé in Galeria Joan Prats, ‘Unsettled’ alludes metaphorically to painting, the central subject of his entire work.

“Unsettled” means unstable, but also variable, restless, something that includes opposites, or a paradox. In Uslé’s paintings, the stripes of color fluctuate, they do not have a definite beginning and end, and refer to the passage of time, the hours, the seasons, the changing landscapes, such as Bernia, a mountain range located in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula, a place of inspiration for Uslé, among many others.

 

Juan Uslé’s work reflects on the possibilities of painting. In his words: “Speaking of painting, I would also talk about his tremor, his ‘no fixation’, his journey or, even better, what we understand as displacement.”

 

Formed by repeated strokes, although never identical, his work is characterized by movement and rhythm, and invoke the surrounding environment, and, at the same time, the energy of the body’s drives. Uslé creates a pictorial language where formal or metalinguistic aspects are mixed with his life experience, in addition to allusions to time and the creation process itself. According to Juan Uslé: “Time is what we have left. I conceive it as a horizontal surface where past and future moments are deposited and transfigured. Many of my small works seem to go on, spread in space. They suggest a “landscape” –let’s call it this way- or space of multiple juxtaposed horizons.”

 

In the exhibition, Uslé presents small formats, which create a close and intimate relationship together with large-scale works, the largest dimension he has worked with and which he started in 2017. Small works are organized into families, and speak of repetition, but also individually contain their own identity.

 

The exhibition is completed with two large format photographs. They make allusions to the painting and invoke the recollection and emotion of the discovery.

Like his paintings, they question our ability to see, think, perceive and feel.

TRÍPLEX. Luis Gordillo, Miki Leal, Rubén Guerrero

20.09.2019 – 17.11.2019

 

CENTRO PÁRRAGA.

 

 

Proyecto comisariado por Sema D’Acosta

 

Espacio 2

 

Inauguración: viernes 20 de septiembre, 20:30 h

 

Luis Gordillo (Sevilla, 1934) es una de las referencias indiscutibles de la pintura española del último medio siglo. Su trabajo ha recorrido, década tras década desde los años sesenta del siglo pasado, todos los avatares que ha vivido la contemporaneidad en España. Sin duda, es uno de los autores más admirados y respetados de nuestro país. Su obra se ha presentado de muchas maneras en este tiempo y se ha analizado desde incontables puntos de vista, pero nunca antes había afrontado un proyecto a tres con otros dos pintores, en este caso, Miki Leal (Sevilla, 1974) y Rubén Guerrero (Sevilla, 1976), asumiendo este nivel de complicidad.

 

La propuesta que se plantea ahora para el Centro Párraga de Murcia no es una exposición colectiva al uso, más bien se trata de un encuentro afortunado entre tres artistas que se conocen y aprecian. Partiendo desde el compromiso con la pintura, la idea es adentrarse por determinadas zonas comunes que se entrecruzan en el proceso de trabajo, un itinerario que ha ido superponiendo capas y compartiendo situaciones hasta generar después de varios meses una serie de piezas afines.

 

Para Luis Gordillo, ‘TRÍPLEX’ supone un ejercicio de implicación y conexión con la gente joven. Para Rubén Guerrero y Miki Leal, una oportunidad única para aprender, intercambiar pareceres y observar desde dentro los modos de cocción y madurar la obra de uno de nuestros maestros. La argamasa que los une mezcla convicción, aptitud y dedicación.

 

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Flag-dancing-moves-lola-lasurt

Centre Cultural Terrassa
05.09 – 06.10.2019

Obras finalistas

 

17 de septiembre a las 19h acto de entrega del 16º Premio BBVA de Pintura Ricard Camí.

 

El Premio se instituyó en 1988 con el fin de estimular la creación pictórica y de contribuir a la promoción y la proyección de jóvenes valores. A lo largo de los años, se ha ido introduciendo en los círculos culturales, artísticos y docentes, y ha devenido una cita tradicional dentro del panorama artístico catalán y un escaparate de la pintura actual que pretende ser una referencia de tendencias y de propuestas nuevas de la plástica contemporánea en Cataluña.

 

La exposición recoge las obras finalistas de la 16ª edición de un certamen que muestra una presencia rica de lenguajes y de técnicas, una inquietud innovadora de los participantes, un buen nivel cualitativo y una participación de artistas de todo.

 

Esta bienal es también un recuerdo permanente a la figura de Ricard Camino, que fue presidente de Caixa Terrassa y que tuvo siempre una especial sensibilidad por la cultura y el arte, y en particular para la pintura.

 

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Juan Usle, Ibiza

08.06.2019 – 31.10.2019

Museu d’Art Contemporani d’Eivissa

 

Juan Uslé

Inauguración el viernes 7 de junio de 2019 | Sala de Armas del MACE

Colaboran: Conselleria de Cultura del Govern Balear y AmicsMACE

 

Juan Uslé I Carbón y Maculares I 2011 – 2018 I Cartulina y técnica mixta I 56 x 71,2 cm. I Foto: Sergio Belinchón

 

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La locura del ver, 2016-17

We present Phasma, the seventh exhibition by José María Sicilia in Galería Joan Prats, where we show his recent work, with abstract pieces that incorporate fabrics and embroidery and whose shapes come from sonograms.

 

The word that entitles the exhibition, Phasma, of Greek origin, designates the specters and apparitions and refers, as described by the artist, to “something that appears and disappears, a butterfly that goes by flapping its wings” and that “speaks of the light as a fold”.

 

In the exhibition, together with the Phasma series, started in Japan, we find the series of El Instante, collages made from drawings of the last ten years, and works from the series La Locura del ver. The creation process of this last series is linked to a sonographic technology that results from an experiment carried out by Thomas Young in 1801, which allowed for the detection of the wave nature of light through its diffraction across two networks successively distanced from a luminous source. This experiment serves as a starting point for a software that allows Sicilia to decompose the sound in order to create cartographies of lines and shapes, some drawings, painting, collage and embroidery compositions that result in the works of La Locura del ver.

 

This technology gives José María Sicilia a tool to reach a new depth. In this new development of his work we find everything that was already present in his previous artistic evolution: the strength of color, the movement of light, a fondness for the organic and the process of unification and opposition that, since the eighties, his painting have shown. His first production had a strong expressionist character and deepened in the monochrome of white. Later on, his career is marked by the discovery of wax as a material, by the appearance of flowers, beehives and also by photography. Sicilia is a restless creator who has based his work on the questioning of shape. He is an artist who interrogates, who does not accept molds and feels the need to break the formats, summoning the emotion of the spectator.

 

José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954) lives and works in Madrid. He has recently exhibited in Museo Casa de la Moneda and Calcografía Nacional, Madrid (2017); Musée Delacroix, Paris (2015), Palacete del Embarcadero, Santander (2014); Matadero, Madrid and Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art (2013); Hospital de la Caridad, Sevilla (2012); Maison Erasme, Brussels and Amos Anderson Art Museum of Helsinki (2010); Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum (2008). His work is present in important public and private collections, among which stand: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; MOMA, New York; Fundació ‘la Caixa’, Barcelona; Colección Banco de España, Madrid; Collection Ville de Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Torino; MNCARS, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The New York Public Library, New York.

José María Sicilia / La locura del ver

Museo Casa de la Moneda

Del 20 de Enero al 16 de Abril de 2017

 

La locura del ver

“Ver, ver más, ver siempre más. Ver es no ser. Lo importante del ver no es la suma de conocimientos que derivan del ver, sino la fisura, el sinsentido en el interior del ver, el accidente extraño.” José María Sicilia

 

En el marco del premio Tomás Francisco Prieto, el Museo Casa de la Moneda presenta la obra del artista español José María Sicilia (nacido en 1954) que reúne un conjunto de creaciones importantes, representativas de los tres últimos años e inspiradas en sus frecuentes viajes, sobre todo a Oriente Próximo y Japón.

José María Sicilia ha dedicado gran parte de su indagación pictórica a interrogar el espacio inmaterial que existe entre el arte y la vida, Eros y Tánatos. Más allá de su belleza inmediata, las obras de José María Sicilia nos llevan a territorios fronterizos, donde la memoria se pone en abismo.

Entre sus últimas exposiciones se incluyen las realizadas en el Musée Delacroix, París; Palacete del Embarcadero, Santander; Centre Pompidou Metz; Matadero Madrid; Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art, Fukushima; Santa Caridad de Sevilla, Sevilla; Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki; Prefectural Art Museum, Nagasaki; Musée du Louvre, París; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Búfalo.

Las obras de José María Sicilia están presentes en importantes colecciones tanto públicas como privadas en Europa y Estados Unidos y Asia, incluyendo: Museum of Modern Art, Nueva York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Nueva York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre Pompidou, París; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Burdeos; Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Colección Arte Contemporáneo, Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona; CAAM, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Colección Banco de España, Madrid; Colección Comunidad de Madrid, Madrid, entre otras.

 

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Esborradis, exhibition from Jordi Alraraz

 

Lunes 23 | Enero – Domingo 11 | Junio, 2017

Fundació Vila Casas, Can Framis. Barcelona

Jordi Alcaraz (Calella, 1963) es un creador en el intersticio que separa la poesía visual y la proyección conceptual, con una propuesta de aproximación metafórica al objeto. Alcaraz experimenta con materiales frágiles presos de un cierto lirismo –el agua, el vidrio, el espejo, el libro– para trabajar relaciones de tensión entre la materia y tejer un discurso en torno al volumen, el lenguaje y el tiempo. Su obra, que trasciende el límite entre disciplinas, es un alegato a favor de la obra inacabada y el arte como ficción.

 

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Enrique Martínez Celaya

Palos, Cuba, 1964

Lives and works in Los Angeles

 

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya works with painting, developing it from the perspective of scientific thought, philosophical, poetic and intellectual.

 

His work brings a permanent concern about experience and representation to light. It is an answer to the surrounding world, especially to nature, the environment of being, and his own perception through ideas that appear over and over again: the child, the sea, the trees, the mountains, the animals, the birds.

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s works exposes the possibilities and limits of representation at the same time. His paintings are a poetic way to explore notions such as confidence, symbolism, displacement, fragmentation, integrity, time, memory and identity.

Fabian Marcaccio

Rosario, Argentina, 1963

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Fabian Marcaccio is one of the pioneers of digital painting. Attempting to redefine the pictorial genre, his work extends the temporal and spatial parameters, and tracks the integration of the hand-made and the machine-made.

 

In the nineties, he worked with composition and digital printing and, later on 3D printing, to create pictorial works that he calls Paintants, a neologism from painting and mutant. Marcaccio considers painting as a constellation of changing content, sometimes rendered as panels, sometimes as 3D configurations, sometimes as animations, and sometimes on an environmental scale.

Lola Lasurt

Barcelona, 1983

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

Lola Lasurt’s artistic activity focuses on painting and video and many times also on collaborative processes that confer a universal projection, to her works of a more personal character.

 

The project about the ‘des-time’ can be understood as the analysis and the questioning of a time period, previous to hers. This is one of the main axis of her work, that frequently uses as a starting point elements from the material and aesthetic culture, that reveal behavioral patterns and ideological parameters of a determined era.  

 

Her pieces revolve around the themes of the memory and the oblivion, the nostalgia and the amnesiac need. Lola Lasurt is interested in the historical individual time and its relationship with the guidelines of the hegemonic culture and the construction of collective symbols.

Alicia Kopf

Girona, 1982

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

From the exercise of drawing and writing, Alicia Kopf reflects on apparently individual issues that have become generational concerns.

 

The expressive dimension of her work is related to her studies in Fine Arts and Comparative Literature, studies that allow her to get closer to subjects as diverse as poor housing or the epic of polar exploration from a position that combines both awe and ironic distance.

 

Alicia Kopf’s work arises from a metaphor, which allows her to perform an analytic exercise that will finally lead to different associations. Thus, in her project Articantàrtic, from the appropriation and the reshaping of graphical and narrative documents, Alicia Kopf turns a historical account into a first person narrative concerning resistance, obsession and the idea of conquest.

Luis Gordillo

Seville, 1934

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

Luis Gordillo started his career during the fifties when he travelled to Paris and got acquainted with the European art of the time, in particular with artists such as Wols, Dubuffet, Michaux and Fautrier. In his first works the influence of surrealism and Tàpies can be appreciated to which an early seventies Pop art associated iconography would be incorporated in later years.

 

Gordillo becomes one of the permanently renovating painters of the pictorial language and one of the artists that during the early seventies reincorporate figuration. It’s likewise in that moment, when he starts to work with photographic images, that this, in some way or another, is introduced in the process of creation in his paintings.

 

Both ideas, that of the process and the continuous construction as resource of accumulation, are elements that are permanently present in his work.

Evru / Zush

Barcelona, 2001 (from 1946, Alberto Porta, and from 1968, Zush)

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Alberto Porta adopts the name Zush in 1968 when he consciously initiates the creation of his own world parallel to reality. This world constituted by his artistic work is named “Evrugo Mental State”, which is a State such as a bubble territory.

 

In this state there even exists an alphabet called “asura”, a passport, a flag, ambassadors… His iconography is nourished by images that Evru/Zush has been elaborating from biographic elements: eyes, vital organs, fire, water, etc.

 

From the eighties, Zush incorporates new digital means to his work which boost the interactivity and the relevant role that the spectator assumes. His work aims –according to what he himself has commented in some occasions- to achieve harmony in art, science and mysticism, which would make possible to recover the balance present in childhood.

Victoria Civera

Port de Sagunt, Valencia, 1955

Lives and works between New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Victoria Civera’s career began in the seventies, working mainly photomontage. Over the next decade she focused on painting, abstract at first, but then introduced figurativism. In the middle of this decade Victoria Civera moves to New York and integrates photography and sculpture to her practice. Her creations undergo a transformation, making them more introspective.

 

Because of the iconography of her work, focused on the feminine universe, and because of her oneiric content, Victoria Civera has achieved a personal language, full of nuances. She moves in between large-scale pieces, in which she uses industrial materials, and suggested and poetic understatement pieces, often incorporating ordinary household objects.

Alfons Borrell

Barcelona, 1931 – Sabadell, 2020

 

 

Alfons Borrell is one of the most prominent representatives of lyrical abstraction in Catalonia.

 

After attending the studio of Anglada Camarasa and the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Alfons Borrell began his artistic career in the fifties, within figuration at first. His work evolved into abstract expressionism and, already in the sixties, to the gestural painting.

 

In the mid-seventies he developed the style of its own, detached of any label, characterized by a sober chromatism that  is consciously disassociated from the material informality. In his painting, the color is imposed on the form, from a language that waives any reference, craving and seeking restraint and rigor.

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.

Perejaume

Sant Pol de Mar, 1957

Lives and works in Sant Pol de Mar

 

 

Perejaume started to exhibit his work during the late seventies and since then he has been developing it in parallel, either in visual disciplines or in literary extension.

 

The landscape is a recurring subject analyzed and explored in his work, retaking and reevaluating the presence it has had most of all, in its literary and visual production. Through this approach, his relationship with the landscape is examined from diverse points of view none of which are exempt of irony. Points of view that are shaped through painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video or the intervention on the natural environment itself.

 

For Perejaume, man is part of the landscape, he isn’t an outsider to it and he is yet another agent in its conformation and evolution, as if the geologic time would have been accelerated.

Javier Peñafiel

Zaragoza, 1964

Lives and works in Mallorca

 

 

Javier Peñafiel’s work, drawings, videos, texts and sculptures make up a linguistic system parallel to a reality to which he is unconnected.

 

All through his career, Javier Peñafiel has built up a universe inhabited by characters; by sentences that work autonomously, such as phrases that have the duty to bother the quiet and routine based use of the language by the spectator; or videos where diverse elements are combined in the shape of tableaux, sharing a space but keeping at the same time their identity separate.

 

The works of Javier Peñafiel show the necessity and the difficulty in direct communication. His works investigate the double identity – as obstacle and as a bridge- that the language represents in such communication.

Fernando Prats

Santiago de Chile, 1967

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

In his work Fernando Prats “paints” or, we’d rather say, recreates nature; he deals with registering tracks, making the invisible visible, giving voice and image to what was present but kept unnoticed.

 

Using seismographs, traces, photographs, videos… he registers the beat of different realities on smoked supports, from the flight of birds to the wild jet of a geyser, the deep coal of mines or the powerful waves that break against the cliff. Thus, Fernando Prats holds an unorthodox relationship with painting, both for the choice of his instruments and for the intervention of chance.

 

His work is formalized in actions which himself registers, that show the creative processes intrinsic to his work. Fernando Prats paintings are time-objects, as they condense in their finished form a story, the one of its creation, whose times often have nothing to do with the ones of the artist, but with the natural rhythms.

Ràfols Casamada

Barcelona, 1922-2009

 

 

Besides his long pictorial career which has boosted him internationally, Albert Ràfols Casamada has another creative side as a literary poet. It is of no surprise that his multidisciplinary character attracts him to teaching and pedagogy in the world of fine Art.

 

In his painting, modernity’s fragile equilibrium has been developed and maintained: his work, of classical origin, incorporates at the same time the legacy of the avant-gardes.

 

During the early seventies he abandoned figuration to work in the field of abstract painting that would take him, during the eighties and nineties, to develop a more lyrical abstraction. This process would lead to what is his most recognized stage in his artistic career.

 

On the other hand, Ràfols Casamada has had a fundamental role in the renewal of the arts teaching in Spain being the founding member of the Eina School in Barcelona in 1967.

Julião Sarmento

Lisbon, 1948- Estoril, 2021

 

 

From the early seventies, Julião Sarmento has explored the possibilities of painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. There is a process of suggestive hiding in his works that situates the spectator not only as an observer but also as a participant of his narrative.

 

The woman is a recurring motive in his works and from it he elaborates concepts linked to sexuality, desire or seduction. The relationships he evokes, on latent tension, violence, obsession or mystery, are obtained from a meticulous dynamic between the participating agents in the physical space, in the case of installations, or in the edition, in case of films and videos. The resulting works unleash all the detached intrigue of the images in constant suspense and tension.

José María Sicilia

Madrid, 1954

 

 

José María Sicilia was one of the most significant representatives of Spanish painting in the eighties who identified himself with the young generation of artists that at the beginning of that decade, took up the practice of a `material´ perspective in painting

 

From 1985, Sicilia initiates a new series of works on the subject of flowers, by which he is specially recognized in Spain. This new thematic development would take him deeper in an investigation focused in the analysis of the shape, the construction of space and the structure of light.

 

In the abstract painting that this artist has developed lately, the use of wax acquires a main role for its possibilities of dialogue with light and the creation of spaces in the pictorial surface.