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.
