Inhabiting art – The New Spain

Faced with these paintings, of an almost photographic figuration, we feel the need to go further, to enter those imagined spaces that the artist offers and that treasure endless previous studies carried out in solitude. They recreate cozy interior worlds, whose shelter is of emotional range, capable of stimulating us sensitively and intellectually. His formal skill is admirable and, through that technical virtuosity that has always characterized his work, he conceives new formal discoveries of effective and forceful solidity; the essential is found in them, from them the transcendent is accessed, “doing with what there is what there is not” (Javier Utray).

The simple and silent exhibition space of the Guillermina Caicoya gallery encourages recollection in front of each work. You have to let yourself be carried away and contemplate them with time, stopping at the rigorous and minimal figuration of their perfect perspectives flooded by lights and shadows that fill the space with suggestions. This is the case in “Empty walls” or “Out there II”, pieces in which a formal slippage of the artist towards abstraction is clearly noticed and that could indicate new ways in her painting. It is surprising how, by making ourselves participants in a precise moment of light concentration, we access another plane of aesthetic stimuli and sensations that are difficult to classify. In “Detained Spaces” the architectural structures have an imprecise appearance, their nakedness causes that indefiniteness but, beyond the similarity with the aseptic worlds that the French anthropologist Marc Augé described as non-places – those dehumanized transit zones that repeat neutral aesthetic patterns -, in these acrylics the emotional charge of the author is latent, it reverts to us, feeding us intimately, offering us new realities, other possible and alternative worlds, attractive interior landscapes where we can calm our gaze and compensate for the visual excesses that surround us.

There are paintings in which some chromatic element is incorporated; the color expands through the partitions that limit vision and channel a light that floods everything with multiple shades of red and green, enlivening the sober minimalist nudity that characterizes the entire exhibition. In “Little red ball” or “Little red ball 2”, the light condensation becomes even more evident, impregnating them with connotations and meanings that escape the rational; it is energy that fertilizes forms. They recall the importance that, at different moments in history, the symbolism of light has had in the field of communication and art, both in its mystical plane and in that referred to the lights of reason and that, in these paintings They seem to converge in a perfect encounter of the immaterial (the spiritual) with matter.

This exhibition is, without a doubt, an enriching experience, Mónica Dixon’s commitment is an example of how, from the plastic creation, experiences that transcend unique mental and emotional states can be triggered, where objective observation is gradually weakened by the Intangible force of the imagination, where the reality and appearance of things take a back seat to delve into other more essential areas that inhabit us. The author continues to surprise with a very personal work, capable of combining the love of figuration with an approach to abstraction. As the critic Rubén Suárez said when contemplating the paintings of his previous exhibition in this gallery: “It is a satisfaction for the viewer who is always grateful to see such reflective paintings that leave, after the first glance, a permanent aesthetic aftertaste”. After visiting “Detained Spaces”, a deep mark remains on us.