Federico Herrero
dal 14/3/2006 al 14/4/2006
Segnalato da
14/3/2006
Federico Herrero
Juana de Aizpuru Gallery, Madrid
Herrero uses this genre as a window to mental images, an extract of memories that compose the painting. The artist composes his works from layers of flat colours that, without any tonal transition, overlap one to each other like a collage, by taking several non-objective shapes, playing between abstraction and figuration.
Solo exhibition
On March 15 Juana de Aizpuru galley opens its new exhibition in which the artist from Costa Rica, Federico Herrero (San Jose', 1978), shows his recent works. In this second visit of the painter to Spain and to the Gallery, a total of 16 works will be exhibited, 5 in large size, up to 350 x 250 cm, and the size of the rest varies until 35 x 50 cm, by covering in this way a wide range of sizes.
In this exhibition the artist offers again a series of magnificent landscapes where colour is the protagonist. He uses this genre as a window to mental images, an extract of memories that compose the painting. The method is as the Magdalene of Proust looking for the lost time, it starts from an action for evoking a group of memories that, supported by a boundless imagination, are the objects represented in the painting, so with a rational touch, he internalizes the outside realities.
Technically, Federico composes his works from layers of flat colours that, without any tonal transition, overlap one to each other like a collage, by taking several non-objective shapes, playing between abstraction and figuration. From these colour layers appears friendly and sweet “little monsters", which origin is as much in the symbolic language of Miro' as in the infantilism of Dubuffuet, but always bearing in mind the contemporary environment of the young painter, that’s why it is not strange to find social subjects, from current neighbourhoods, as football, cinema, the beach or electronic world.
This ingenuous “small creatures" are drawn with a few strokes of Pilot, like it was a modern sign language, so these recur and appear in several paintings. This contrast between drawing and colour, mass and vacuum, seems to refer to the painting purity, by questioning as much figuration as abstraction, looking for new forms that took the artist to exceed the painting space, making incursions in the mural world, which is seen in this exhibition, not only in the large size of some pieces but also in a wall he will decorate in the gallery.
That tension, which generates the contrast between the purest chromatic value and the fine stroke of the pen, responds to a provocation, a song to the liberty from a playful, benevolent and funny point of view, with a sweetener touch of irony.
In conclusion, paintings of Federico Hererro emit a poetic halo that is the reminiscence of his expressive speech defined by the colour power and the gentleness of graphic forms produced by the ink line or the “spray". The rhetoric of Federico may be influenced by many artists of historic vanguards, as the musical harmony of Kandinski‘s colours, the naivete' of Klee or the language of Miro' and by other artists closer to him as Orozco or Matta. However, it’s true that Federico’s painting means the top of originality and is destined to become in paradigm of Art History.
Finally, a personal bet from the artist: the one who is able to understand the title of the exhibition, will understand his paintings perfectly.
Juana de Aizpuru Gallery
Calle Barquillo, 44 - Madrid