The essence of a solitary landscape

El Mundo

10/25/2014

Barcelona, Vanessa Graell

Artist Monica Dixon exhibits her intímate works in the show ‘Nowhere land’, in Barnadas Art Gallery


A lonely house in the middle of Nowhere, between sky and land. Silence almost materializes in that existentialist, metaphysic, introspective landscape. At dawn or in the evening, in a bright day or in a grey foggy day, is the house, under different lights. Artist Monica Dixon assembles twenty of her dream landscapes in the exhibition ‘Nowhere land’, wich can be visited in Jordi Barnadas Art Gallery until november 8th. And in april she will be showing another one person exhibition art brand-new Barnadas Huang Art Gallery in Singapore, in wich her paintings have already been a sucess (in just one week she sold all her works in the setting of a group exhibition).


“I was raised in two places, between Spain and the U.S. I spent many summertimes in a house like this, in New Jersey, in a town named Marlton. There was a lake near by and Woodland. And  we ran trough the fields. But these houses are pure imagination, non existent”, Dixon recalls, daughter of an american father and spanish mother, in front of one of her paintings.
In that no-place, that imaginary land that could be anywhere in the United States, one can recognize the tradition of american realist painting, with clear influences of Edward Hopper or the hiperrealism of Richard Estes. But Dixon (who studied fine arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey), purifies the landscape to the mínimum expression, she strips it in search of an essence, inevitabily linked to light, wich she materializes in really thin paint strokes, delicate transparencies almost imperceptible.


 “At first i painted still lifes and human figure. But now I minimalize everything. I’ve been disposessing of the pictorial space everything that Isaw as anecdotic”, the artista admits, who tries to represent the space in its own, to capture the luminic variations in the atmosphere. And the only element is that atmosphere is the house, wich are many and varied, but all one; the typical ameerican house that becomes a metaphor and symbol of human lonely ness.
“It’s about isolated places, they could be at the end of the world. But I’m interese on the sensation they produced”, Dixon says. A sensation that goes from restlessness to happyness depending on the kind of landscape and mood of the artista (by the way, Monica Dixon usually listens to southern rock while she paints, original country rock)
Even though she paints innumerable houses, there is not one that is the same. And some of her canvases even come close to pop art (two saturated colors, blue and green, sky and land, with a house that resembles a toy house) While in others, like ‘Warwick’, obscurity falls over a luminous White house with a reddis a roof, in wich you can have the intuition of a shady story going on inside. Dixon’s paintings give off a halo of mistery, they suggest hidden stories, stories that oclur inside the house banned from the viewer. Her works oscílate between fleeting skies, destabilising shadows, and great luminosity.
In parallel to her clean bright exteriors, Dixon develops another series of interiors, opposite to her landscapes: hallways, Windows, a radiator on the hall, open doors, room corners… All the scenes are solitary. And the light always ends up Dixon’s material.   

http://www.monicadixongallery.blogspot.com.es/2014/10/nowhere-land-galeria-jordi-barnadas.html