Now, that I remember.( Paco Lorca)

It called my attention that when this exhibition was being planned, there must have been no need to give it a title, and maybe that was because it circles around the painter, without any more baggage other than her name. For sure, when you arrive at the Orfila Gallery, you discover that the various works do not show this repetitive uniformity in order to provide a homogeneous aspect which one so often finds at art exhibitions. In this case, each work by Maria Aparici, each canvas is a state of emotion, an explosion of sentiments which go from the exhaustion of a hot day to melancholy of another grey and rainy one, passing relaxation and observation, up to, like a photographer friend of mine used to say “the let’s go criticize”. Writes Aparici: “ I think that art has to reduce the distance between artist and spectator, in the hope that the image remain in the latter’s memory forever”, and this seems to be the title for this exhibition, she herself, her state of mind and the intent to perpetuate each one of her feelings in the spectator’s mind.

 

Each painting seems a moment, and according to the author, “the combination of my mental state and my personal observations is what I translate into my work”. Her work is vigorous, even explosive at times, with the force that is expressed by a wide brush stroke, a decisive and profound stroke and a composition in which the protagonist, a person or an animal, almost always a dog, travel to the front without forgetting a secondary personage who seems to be observing the scene from a second level. The composition reminds one of German expressionism, I hear someone say “I am reminded of Kirchner”, even if it does not have the tortuous and bitter expression of his personalities; in others, the intensity of the work moves toward abstraction and the protagonist becomes diffuse like a thought between shadows, lights and wishes that are difficult to express if not by way of intuition because each painting is numbered and I can hardly read the titles in a separate note. And I like it this way, because I like being guided by the spectator’s intuition.

 

Each painting is a story, I continue to think, and whilst I think about that, a new visitor enters the gallery. She is intrigued by the smell of the room: it smells of canvas, paint and oils. It is like entering the artist’s studio, and in the room’s silence – the music finished a while ago- the visitor is only accompanied by a soft smell of oil and dissolvent, like certifying the authenticity of the work: “Oil has the virtue of enforcing itself, to extract color with the passage of time. The painter who works the light cannot paint with any other element that is not oil, the vermillion, the cadmium..” and this is what seems to happen with these two very elegant women – Two very Elegant Ladies- which hangs in front of the visitor.

 

I move around the room like an orphan, for not having met the painter in person, move from painting to painting, from story to story, reading the catalogue, trying to find something that would take me to a specific moment, the original thought: “in only one single day, we suffer different appearances, severe ones, sad ones, warm and violent ones, passionate ones..”

 

And following the rhythm of these recent days, in which I almost miss some exhibitions for arriving late and the time does not leave me space to reflect, to absorb the works and digest them, I dare write only about my first impression, someone else’s spoken thought or my own, in order to retain, like I read at the beginning, the images so that they may remain in my memory and to be able to transmit them with the extraordinary force, the violent and passionate gesture which seems to rest in every one of these canvases.