Some Tendencies in Spanish Painting Now, featuring Jorge Galindo, Alejandro Garmendia, Felicidad Moreno, and Matías Sánchez is currently on view as Villa Magdalena’s inaugural exhibition. For the first time, these artists are being shown all together under the same roof, hoping to initiate a fresh dialogue about painting in this geographical context.

 

This exhibition is not an attempt to define a specific movement; it is a selection of four artists’ personal narratives, which explore questions about abstraction, figuration, what to paint, and how to paint. Each artist has their own version, or solution to what could be seen as a painting now. This exhibition is an attempt to present this discourse, the manifestation of diverse identities that inform the contemporary landscape of Spanish painting. The walls in the space are paintings themselves, made of moss, stains, and other natural incidents of the humidity of the Basque region.

 

Jorge Galindo (Madrid, 1965) has been at the forefront of gestural abstract painting in Spain since the early 90’s. Series like Patchwork, Fotomontajes Pintados, and Pintura Animal evoke an inventive use of collage, variety of imagery, and relentless expressionist brushwork. His most recent ongoing series, El Eco de las Flores, combine action painting with a determined subject. The flowers in these works are bright and executed in a loose manner. They are in constant movement, almost illusive, as if they can change or disappear in any moment. In these paintings, like many others from the past, the composition and brushwork disintegrates, transforms, and then rebuilds itself. They are dynamic because, regardless of the imagery or subject matter, keep reconfiguring and never become familiar. 

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Alejandro Garmendia (San Sebastián, 1959 – 2017) possessed a subversive attitude and an ingenious approach to the aesthetic structure and formal aspects of landscape and architecture. He commandeered them to a point of departure where a plethora of images manifested themselves in a variety of ways, documenting the non-existent and creating the physically impossible. Phantasmagorical objects shift, transforming what we are looking at into a world where scale and plane are mixed together until gravity ceases to exist. Scenes that do not necessarily conform to one particular style, ultimately present a distanced metaphysical vision of an emotional character filled with solitude and melancholy; that brings us into a new painted irreality. 

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Felicidad Moreno’s (Madrid, 1960) paintings convey something cosmic and microscopic at the same time. Infinitely small and infinitely large. Over the years Moreno has mined a painterly language of overlapping lines, spray paint, melting enamel drips and gestural curved marks, which become beams of light and shadows, creating abstractions spiraling into the unknown. Moreno has embarked on an aesthetic journey where there is no beginning or end. Her work creates a parallel reality that allows the imagination to float in space and simultaneously, experience a molecular view of the world. 

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Matías Sánchez (Tubingen, 1972) presents his own dark version of history and everyday life. The characters in his work are both frightening and charming. A theater of marginalized folk and animals, more rural in character than urban. Smokers, drunkards, farmers, rats, ugly cats, and unappreciated philosophers. One thinks of the vagabonds in Luis Buñuel’s, Viridiana. The poetics of ugliness. These paintings are dense in form and storytelling. From an early age Sánchez was exposed to Spanish Baroque painters like Juan de Valdés Leal, who flourished in Andalucía, especially in Seville, where the artist has spent most of his life. His packed compositions and exaggerated figurative gestures illustrate a visceral response to that historical moment. “Exaggeration is what we live off everyday” (Matías Sánchez).