Objects without space, space without objects

La Nueva España

03/10/2011

Oviedo, Juan Carlos Gea  

The solo exhibitions of Miguel macaya in Van Dick Art Gallery and Monica Dixon in Casa Duro Art Center explore at once the posibilities and limits of figurative painting.

If the viewer has some spare time and is able to do it on the same day, it would be worth the displacement to see- no matter the order- Miguel Macaya’s monographic (Santander 1964) in Van Dick Art Gallery (Gijon) and afterwards stop by Casa Duro Art Center (Mieres) to gaze at “The voice of the quiet (from object to space)”, to review Monica Dixon’s work in the last few years (Camden, NJ, 1971)

Obviously, each exhibition has its own personality, quality and essence and shoul be considered in their own value. But perhaps the trip will be worth it to enjoy in different ways but also related,  without loosing the deep mistery enclosed in each one of them, what we often generically call “figuration.”And to also confirm the limits of a word that, in a nonsense way,  is often considered equal to “realism” and opposed to “abstraction”(...). 

For Dixon objects and space are, before anything, excuses to devote herself to the practice of painting  for the sake of painting, in the margin of what is being represented with it.
(...)Monica Dixon welcomes everyone to “read” her work over the last years, reviewed in Mieres as a journey “from the object to the space”.  In it, her meticulous and almost Franciscan concentration towards the powerful existence of beings and banal objects, has been widened litle by little, to pay attention to the space in which they were inmersed; but, significantly, slowly expulsing any trace of those same beings and objects. The domestic interiors, were we could still see furniture, materials or textures in which Dixon  would explore the effects against the light, had become an even more neutral scene in which the minimal elements are what matters, to define the space and light, understood in everyway  as the “motif” of her painting, and treated  more and more as abstract realities, but still shaped with strokes of a reality that can still be recognized; No matter if it’s a hallway or a room, impersonal and uninahabited, which seems to bring us to the great Velazquian spaces, or Tintiretto’s “Lavatorio”, or Goya’s “Junta de Filipinas”, or to the Hopperian landscapes rescued from the landscapes of her native North America in which an isolated farm, a barn or a silo become mere references contrasting the absolutism of the space that gobbles it.