Letter from Spain
Jos� Luis Molina Gonz�lez / Tranlated by Chema F.S
It’s not easy to do an analysis of the heterogeneous map of styles that appear in the Spanish contemporary art. Even in the great international fair ARCO, one can only get a glimpse.
After the legacy left by Velázquez, Murillo, Zurbarán, Goya, Sorolla, Fortuny, and those closer to us, Picasso, Dalí, Miro, Tapies, Chillida, Saura, Palazuelo, Zobel, Barceló, and many others impossible to enumerate in these lines, Spain has one of the richest traditions in the plastic arts. But that doesn’t mean that anything with the label "Spanish art" will be of similar quality.
This heritage weighs over all Spain’s contemporary creators. On the one hand we have those nostalgics, struggling with the difficult language of painting, who, playing with new iconography and symbolism decide to keep the faith in the permanency of the figurative style.
In this way I would like to emphasize Matías Sanchez´s work. He uses painting to redefine its own message. He doesn’t try to have an influence over the spectator, but his strongly expressive and primitive images make us doubt about a system (the contemporary one) that is full of questionable values and contradictions. He completes the difficult task of looking at himself in the mirror to find elements which don’t take into account the traditional concept of beauty. By means of calligraphy and figures he creates a baroque scenery in which multiple stories are played out, from popular traditions to religious values or mass media.
In a parallel universe we can find those artists who ignore the husk and go to the seed. They are supporters of the precepts of conceptual art who defend a kind of art free from rigid ties and formalisms. They show us a world of ideas. They try to dissociate us from the world we live in. Paco Lara-Barranco is one of them. He is interested in industry and technology, and uses as his material motor oils, photographs in light boxes or video-systems. His interest in the passage of time, and its power over people, has driven him to design process works, in which investigation and method stand out secondary factors.
The last stage is featured by those who, interested in space and its relationship with life, take advantage of external elements to declare a pure and rooted practice, similar to Art Povera or Fluxus. The artist Ángela Lergo takes us into a varied speech that goes between the transgressive actionism of the performance and the objective sculpture that comes from the new space processes of the installation. By using non-traditional materials like liquid mercury, Lergo’s work tries to occupy the spectator’s space in a delicate and all-encompassing way, appreciating the void as a discursive element. Her interest in identity, drives her into an aesthetic process dealing with the essence and appearance debate, where a different use of the symbolic figuration carries us to the so called metaphysical reality.
