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9/7/2012

Francisco Solana

IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia

Francisco Solana’s paintings (Madrid, 1968) reformulate the point of figurative and poetic mode of capturing reality. His paintings are a detailed performance of the look experience, analyzing the complex field of figurative realism where that “untemporary happiness of vision” mentioned by Aldus Huxley may appear as an aperture of a place to a subjective contemplation in which fantasy and the shapes of recognition intervene. Far from the hegemonic literalism and “hybrid” mode, Francisco Solana manifests a basic confidence in the pictorial power. When ban of painting sounds like a delirious litany, he keeps his figurative passion up without relating it with the hegemonic distorted tradition in modernity. Nor he will justify painting in its mere physical dimension as phenomenological area that carries a nominalist deployment, neither he withdraws into the rhetoric of painting as a “mental thing”, that usually derives into fetishism of the so-called conceptual.

Each painter resumes the history of painting in his own way, thereof, Francisco Solana’s work dialogues with crucial moments in History of Art. “To our author, the material – Juan Antonio Fernández Arévalo notices- is deliberately the least. Is precisely the immateriality, with light and color, which gives his paintings a special atmosphere, also a bit unreal and magic. A vaporous light inspired in Flemish and Polish painting –Van Eyck, Vermeer and Rembrandt- or in Leonardo’s “sfumato”, completed by a blended faint gamma, full of subtety and sweetness, and if I am allowed to say: vivid colors as velvet that brightens but doesn’t blind, transmitting serenity, far from de wild fauvism of the beginning of the XX Century and more in the colourist line of the magic realism of Coubet in XIX Century”. If there is an influence that has revealed as decisive in Francisco Solana’s work, is that of Edward Hopper who is, no doubt, a deciding artist in the configuration of the “American view”. Francisco Solana explicitly quotes the “introspective look” of the special melancholy of Hopper, but he mostly takes advance of the metropolitan fragmentation of the details that gives the world a mysterious touch.

Although Francisco Solana’s pictorial “frame” is related to the “photographic” referentiality, his imagination has not the will to research about what is happening, but to include a poetic or fictional dimension. He doesn’t pretend to capture reality mechanically, but metaphorically speaking, to sail in order to find another light. From his paintings of nautical yatch races, given a magic atmosphere that takes him beyond the Mediterranean tradition, to the paintings made in Miami, with that luminosity where we can find Hopper so as to the seductive surface of pop, it is noticed the intention to keep the aesthetic illusion. Francisco Solana needs to cover the field, to be there, to catch the shades and find the color of his dreams, swinging from the metaphysical dimension of the painting and the will of creating a place, to explain a territory that attains an imaginary weightiness.

Francisco Solana’s work is, in every sense, autobiographical. Although he doesn’t appear on it, he is always painting himself , between the ice of the Artic, and the sunny streets of Miami. He continues with a vital navigation in which he draws a “self-portrait” through the captured details of the world. “The trip as a way and guide of exploration it’s constituted in Francisco Solana’s work, as a model of research and through the study of natural" Versus the tourist’s obsession for his “destination”, the travel Francisco Solana paints is, essentially, a sedimentation of experiences. Francisco Solana goes into the Artic more in depth and stares at metropolitan signs, he captures light in distant regions and, as a last resort, he travels to the inside and tries to account for the individual dimension both of loss and reconquest so as to that one that characterizes the object.

Post-romantic sublimity reformulated in Francisco Solana’s painting, has a Hopper tone that consists, not only un the account for the navegatio vital, but also in a time sedimented in the infra-ordinary and the abandonment feeling, the paradoxically fascinating experience of the anodyne. Francisco Solana’s painting is connected to the search for a tune, or better, a vital rhythm: his marines and urban landscapes are dreams, a way to change the true into mystery, he attempts to avoid the fossilization of the imaginary. Francisco Solana is specially attracted by signs, metropolitan writing, the vertigo of the calls of consumer culture. He transforms that business incitements in paintings, and redirects the fierce drive of "idle class" in aesthetic enjoyment. Francisco Solana's travelling images didn't emerge from a mere mirror, they are the result of a look that overwhelms reality and pretends to show us that simple poetic exits (as the painting explicitly titled Exit). Art is a strained passion always related to the unexpected and the unprecedented, bended to the search for something of a promise nature of new experiences.

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until Oct 14, 2012:

Mar Solís

On the one hand there are the materials – wood, steel, aluminium or paper – and on the other, the emotions. The sculptress Mar Solís (Madrid, 1967) constructs from within, from the heart, making majestic, time-defying sculptures. To see her at work is like witnessing fragility and strength, lightness and sturdiness, air and earth. Driven by an impulse to imitate the architecture of the forests, the language of nature, with its pattern of order and chaos, she uses abstraction to define essential questions and pursue dreams, like those that now fill the rooms at the IVAM with their suggestions.
She is a fashioner of signs, a maker of magic in the realm of light and shade, creating paths, transforming atmospheres and altering landscapes. “Art is an inspirer and agitator of the human soul,” she declares. “Art is the ability of human beings to invent, interpret and construct the ideas they cherish.” As the visitor makes his way along the paths that Mar Solís creates, amid groves of curving sculptures that eagerly invite us to pass through them, he feels he is entering a parallel reality, a bold, stimulating land where he can give free rein to his desires. This sculptress from Madrid works with lines in space and with emptiness as volume.
The visitor who walks among these sculptures becomes a transformer of their atmosphere and an irrepressible generator of their movement. He is the inevitable protagonist in the search for places and viewpoints, making the work a vibrant, changeable space. Solís’s works are places of reflection, abstract meditations on fragility and balance. Her sculptures have structures that write on the air lightly and transparently. Their limbs seem to be articulated and they rise in seemingly weightless equilibrium, generating unreal, symbolic spaces similar to Gothic architecture. “Everything begins with drawing,” Mar Solís explains.

Her work on paper is the starting point for this exhibition at the IVAM. In these incursions, studies, models or sketches which in themselves are works of art, she marks out a series of lines in space, approaching emptiness as sculptural volume, seeking sense hidden among the folds and cracks, in the silence left by the hollows. They are pieces of minimal architecture that take shape and mutate as the exhibition proceeds.
Mar Solís has succeeded in making the drawings in her notebooks become sculpture on the basis of a twofold rationale: the spatial aspiration that exists in all drawing, and the similar vocation that has driven Mar Solís in her work as a sculptress from the outset.

Image: Francisco Solana, Peter Miller Hotel, 2011-2012

Department of Communication (34) 96 386 76 79 or send an e-mail to comunicacion@ivam.es

IVAM Institut Valencià d'Art Modern
Guillem de Castro, 118, 46003 Valencia
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday and holidays from 10.00 to 20.00h.
Monday closed, except national or autonomous holiday

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