URBS

An individual exhibition of Miguel Angel Iglesias, curated by Conchi Alvarez

Miguel Angel’s city attracts and fascinates from the very first moment.

His cities are compositions focused on the most modern downtown, in which skyscrapers supremely reign as erect rationalist sculptures. He presents a city from a bird’s eye view to compose exhilarating perspectives that invite the viewer to jump and fly over these giants of steel, glass and concrete. Like a conjurer, he changes the direction of the light to achieve magical perspectives in which the Sky Line of the City, from its suggestive stereometry, promises infinite possibilities.

In his acrylics, one senses the spirit of the artistic anchorite, in need of solitude to create. It is in the isolation of his studio where inspiration comes, drawing on the spaces he has experienced, flown over and then later dreamt of. In spite of urban spaces being populated places par excellence, the absence of human beings in his paintings is significant. His barren cities mask the search for one’s inner self.

The artist claims that he locks himself up in his studio to continue his self-discovery. This search can be detected in each painting, in those everchanging angles that reveal an eternal Penelope who does not unweave the fabric of each and every work, but rather weaves a new one, whilst always yearning for the arrival of her Odysseus to take her away from the abyss and solitude.

For Miguel Ángel, this entire process, his particular Odyssey, is an almost mystical meditation that protects him from the human wolf, but, simultaneously, prepares him to reach his Ithaca and get closer to the people…

He began by painting grisailles, for the city he saw and lived in was sad and full of contradictions. In spite of this, colour started taking over given that his emotions and sensations were channelled through it. His hope for an ideal, harmonious city, the one he would want to live in, was then imposed, as happens with colour. Each colour has meaning in itself, but at the same time gives meaning to the others that surround it. Just like living in society. The horror vacui of the compositions on canvas is broken down in the works on paper, where blank spaces play along with upstanding skyscrapers as mere ghosts that only the painter perceives. It is the weightlessness of the medium which contributes to the blurring of the urban landscape in order to create an allegorical self-portrait in each work infused with intense emotion.

THE PERCUSSIONIST (detail)

Acrylic on panel

100 x 75 cm