STP 001
Solo show by Amaya Suberviola
STP 001
Solo show by Amaya Suberviola
24 February - 25 March 2022
Credits
Elena Feduchi
Amaya Suberviola's work is an exercise in responding to topics from her generation, perhaps more relevant in hers than in previous ones. Amaya is part of a group of painters who, little by little, are representing the return of painting to the place that it intrinsically has never ceased to occupy, but that in recent years has been, in the best of cases, ignored. It is true that with the wide variety of digital media and facilities, it is easier to make interpretations of reality through other supports in contemporary art, such as video or photography. However, painting –as well as drawing– have a kind of pre-eminence over other practices for the simple fact of being a more immediate exercise (without too many mediators); this pre-eminence can play for and against, since the same freedom that the painter has is proportional to the limitation of the medium. Any digital medium contains reality, which is manipulated by the artist, but painting is a translation into a completely different language: it is the artist who generates that reality. For this reason, Suberviola's painting makes a very relevant and pertinent incision in painting as a representative of our current context.
STP (Sin Título Pantalla/Untitled Screen) is the nomenclature for archiving the screenshots that the artist subsequently selects, tests and finally transfers to the canvas. The game between something as human and visceral as painting and something as technological and aseptic as a digital screen is where Amaya finds her language and the way to understand and develop as an artist. When we face the papers and canvases conforming STP-001, our brain tries to grasp and understand what is in front of it, and this is one of the most precious mechanisms of painting; for Amaya, these works on paper and canvases can well replace the role that painting played a couple of centuries ago, a figure that brought us closer to other realities but in which we always had to suspend our ability to discern that reality: digital screens are our current way of consuming it and STP-001 can be a way to apprehend its margins.
As much as painting can be romanticized, this exercise is not at all romantic, metaphorical or metaphysical; any of those meanings, if they happen, are the responsibility of the viewer. Amaya responds to the technicality of digital media with the same coin, focusing on the technical capabilities of painting to represent a given existence. The interesting thing about this game is the complicity that as viewers we sense, seeing ourselves represented in those screenshots that overlap each other –as we do on our computers– but that do not show us anything and leave us to our own devices to reflect how we consume our environment, and if we go a little further, how we understand our own reality.
Once again, through the practice of Amaya Suberviola and her characteristic language, we vindicate the timelessness of painting and its infinite capacity to be a window to our different ways of existing.
STP (Sin Título Pantalla/Untitled Screen) is the nomenclature for archiving the screenshots that the artist subsequently selects, tests and finally transfers to the canvas. The game between something as human and visceral as painting and something as technological and aseptic as a digital screen is where Amaya finds her language and the way to understand and develop as an artist. When we face the papers and canvases conforming STP-001, our brain tries to grasp and understand what is in front of it, and this is one of the most precious mechanisms of painting; for Amaya, these works on paper and canvases can well replace the role that painting played a couple of centuries ago, a figure that brought us closer to other realities but in which we always had to suspend our ability to discern that reality: digital screens are our current way of consuming it and STP-001 can be a way to apprehend its margins.
As much as painting can be romanticized, this exercise is not at all romantic, metaphorical or metaphysical; any of those meanings, if they happen, are the responsibility of the viewer. Amaya responds to the technicality of digital media with the same coin, focusing on the technical capabilities of painting to represent a given existence. The interesting thing about this game is the complicity that as viewers we sense, seeing ourselves represented in those screenshots that overlap each other –as we do on our computers– but that do not show us anything and leave us to our own devices to reflect how we consume our environment, and if we go a little further, how we understand our own reality.
Once again, through the practice of Amaya Suberviola and her characteristic language, we vindicate the timelessness of painting and its infinite capacity to be a window to our different ways of existing.