Irene Anguita
Cordoba, Spain, 1997
Facing Irene’s painting raises questions and mystery, from the intensity of a practice that is evolving. Her painting is a tool to investigate her context, what surrounds her; her language is composed of both conceptual factors—metaphysical even—and tangible elements, what technique does and what links it to matter; we dare say that it is in the material that she has found the fertile ground to continue facing her work from the most honest place possible.
Irene—like other of her contemporaries—has stopped painting under the usual duality of figurative vs. abstract. From our perspective, this decision to not settle on a single ‘style’ has to do with an innate willingness to take risks. What is the need to paint today? For the artist it is something inevitable, but for us who look, the need is still underpinned by danger. If we are all preoccupied (or occupied at best) with the same problems, the way to find different solutions will be through the risks we take in trying to solve them—Irene’s painting works in this way and comes from this place.
Irene’s painting finds itself in that magnificent and delicate moment in which having gone through a strenuous youth, now begins another part of the road where experience is translated into gestures, colors, and compositions that are all equally daring, but loaded with more wisdom.
Irene—like other of her contemporaries—has stopped painting under the usual duality of figurative vs. abstract. From our perspective, this decision to not settle on a single ‘style’ has to do with an innate willingness to take risks. What is the need to paint today? For the artist it is something inevitable, but for us who look, the need is still underpinned by danger. If we are all preoccupied (or occupied at best) with the same problems, the way to find different solutions will be through the risks we take in trying to solve them—Irene’s painting works in this way and comes from this place.
Irene’s painting finds itself in that magnificent and delicate moment in which having gone through a strenuous youth, now begins another part of the road where experience is translated into gestures, colors, and compositions that are all equally daring, but loaded with more wisdom.
