Villa Magdalena is pleased to announce, Room With a View, Cristina Lama’s (Sevilla, 1977) first exhibition with the gallery. The selection of works on display, executed between 2012 and 2017, alternate between a domestic realm and the outside world. Nonetheless, in some cases these two elements coexist in the same picture plane . The corners, windows, walls, chimneys, and invasive plants in her paintings are reflected in the architectural and natural properties of Villa Magdalena.

 

In a fundamental manner, Lama is a painter who relies on intuition more than anything else. Lama refuses to rationalize the things that occur in her paintings, which often depict rooms, landscapes, scenes within scenes. She embraces a fluid and non-hierarchical attitude towards different types of stimulation. Literature, memories from childhood, everyday happenings, and other paintings in mind all blend into the same pictorial tissue.

 

At first glance, the conventional wisdom would be to solely situate her practice within a tradition of narrative painting. The viewer can identify elements from the real physical world that yearn to tell a story. Nonetheless, for Lama, the representational value of her work is always subordinate to the appearance of paint and the fluidity of language—the artist’s primary concern. “The composition on a pictorial level is very Important for me. On the other hand, on a narra- tive, representational level, it’s not so important, although it is part of the sum of information of the work. Those recognizable aspects of the picture serve as an excuse.” Lama insists that the realistic imagery in her paintings is only a pretext allowing her to experiment with different arrangements of lines, forms, colors that are conducive to the overall pictorial evolution and, ultimately, resonate with a more non-objective sensibility.

 

What are the different fragments of life and sources of stimulation that form part of these stories? In Socaire, the artist has presented a situation which unravels in the night. The pine trees –a ubiquitous feature of the Spanish countryside– and the distorted figures is a loose interpretation of the rural scenes of resistance against Franco during the Spanish civil war and an homage to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. In another work of the same size, Santuario, the viewer can see an older painting that has been covered, nonetheless, it still exists in the very bottom of the canvas. Now what one sees is a sequence of white stone columns or “ruins”; a reoccurring motif because of its symbolic weight. In the other pictures on view, she presents more situations that are susceptible to magical incidents: a room taken hostage by an invasive plant species, a surrealist picnic, Dracula’s bedroom.

 

The way in which lama constructs the subjects of her paintings and their total effect undermines accurate representation and conveys a kind of rudimentary technique that speaks to the idiosyncratic figurative approach of Neil Jenney’s “Bad Paintings” or Albert Oehlen’s crude figurative paintings from the early 1980s; painters who, like Lama, have challenged conventional modes of representation.