Carlos León
10 Nov 2009 - 09 Jan 2010
CARLOS LEÓN
From November 10th - January 9th, 2010
Opening: Wednesday November 4th, 20:00
Next November 10th, Max Estrella gallery opens a new show by Carlos León. With this exhibition, called "super-posiciones", the artist offers us his latest works, a new example of commitment between a meditated classicism and a renewed experimentation will.
In conjunction with this exhibition, the Patio Herreriano Museum of Valladolid will open on November 13, a big show of this artist in which works of different periods of his career will face each other. The exhibition will specially focus on his 70's production, linked to the French movement "supports-surfaces" and on the lasts years works, characterised by the use of oil painting on surfaces as dibond (of an industrial whiteness without any grain), or on translucent polyester sheets where he gets blurred geometries and intriguing transparencies.
Carlos León, considers his current production as the culmination of all the experience gained through forty years dedicated to painting and the result of learning, experimentation and discipline that leads to a discourse capable of containing so much freedom as rigor, and to speak in its own language, elegant and desquamated, about those themes that always interested him: the flesh understood as a place, as a scenario, the garden as a symbolic place or the landscape on its physics or aesthetics dimensions. Because of his refined technique, his no conventional search of a beauty that knows the existential pain, Carlos León impregnates each one of his exhibitions with a enigmatic and surprising halo.
The artist old love for the geometry (discipline that as he remembers, appeared at the beginning of art history in the Lascaux cavern), has remained present, in a more or less explicit way during his career, making itself more evident in the 70's, (time when he was vinculated to "support-surfaces", but also to certain aspects of American abstract expressionism, such as the ones approached on the works of Barnett Newman), in works exhibited at the Gamarra-Garrigues gallery in 1991 and in a good part of his recent production. The use of new materials such as polyester sheets allows him, acting by superposition, to reach a geometrical form constructed by a glaze of a great subtlety and conceptual interest, veiling his expressionist gestuality with an almost imperceptible plot, he's situating himself "in between a rhythmic and encoded dialectic" quoted by Julia Kristeva in her Semiotic and from which interesting results must be expected.
The superposition of layers painted over translucid supports, the combination in a same work of elements physically differentiated, the rupture with certain canons of the conventional object-painting and the exploration of a pictoric space that derived from operations that veil and reveal at the same time are the current field of work of the artist. His live and work now seems to merge in lots of aspects, popularly known as "the harvest time".
From November 10th - January 9th, 2010
Opening: Wednesday November 4th, 20:00
Next November 10th, Max Estrella gallery opens a new show by Carlos León. With this exhibition, called "super-posiciones", the artist offers us his latest works, a new example of commitment between a meditated classicism and a renewed experimentation will.
In conjunction with this exhibition, the Patio Herreriano Museum of Valladolid will open on November 13, a big show of this artist in which works of different periods of his career will face each other. The exhibition will specially focus on his 70's production, linked to the French movement "supports-surfaces" and on the lasts years works, characterised by the use of oil painting on surfaces as dibond (of an industrial whiteness without any grain), or on translucent polyester sheets where he gets blurred geometries and intriguing transparencies.
Carlos León, considers his current production as the culmination of all the experience gained through forty years dedicated to painting and the result of learning, experimentation and discipline that leads to a discourse capable of containing so much freedom as rigor, and to speak in its own language, elegant and desquamated, about those themes that always interested him: the flesh understood as a place, as a scenario, the garden as a symbolic place or the landscape on its physics or aesthetics dimensions. Because of his refined technique, his no conventional search of a beauty that knows the existential pain, Carlos León impregnates each one of his exhibitions with a enigmatic and surprising halo.
The artist old love for the geometry (discipline that as he remembers, appeared at the beginning of art history in the Lascaux cavern), has remained present, in a more or less explicit way during his career, making itself more evident in the 70's, (time when he was vinculated to "support-surfaces", but also to certain aspects of American abstract expressionism, such as the ones approached on the works of Barnett Newman), in works exhibited at the Gamarra-Garrigues gallery in 1991 and in a good part of his recent production. The use of new materials such as polyester sheets allows him, acting by superposition, to reach a geometrical form constructed by a glaze of a great subtlety and conceptual interest, veiling his expressionist gestuality with an almost imperceptible plot, he's situating himself "in between a rhythmic and encoded dialectic" quoted by Julia Kristeva in her Semiotic and from which interesting results must be expected.
The superposition of layers painted over translucid supports, the combination in a same work of elements physically differentiated, the rupture with certain canons of the conventional object-painting and the exploration of a pictoric space that derived from operations that veil and reveal at the same time are the current field of work of the artist. His live and work now seems to merge in lots of aspects, popularly known as "the harvest time".