LIGHT AT THE CNAL

La Nueva Espana – Art criticism
September 2020
Luis Feás Costilla

(...) In this fiftieth edition the winner of the Caja Rural Foundation Award has been the painter Monica Dixon with the acrylic 'Night light', which summarizes well the last stage of the trajectory of this North American resident in Oviedo; a central motif that is only a backdrop of the room illuminated laterally, with a partition in the middle that cuts or divides the beam of light and generates a halo that moves towards the most absolute darkness, in an almost total decrease.
In the Borrón de Oviedo Room she also shows a dozen paintings of this same style, one of the two major series in which this figurative painter works, who has been moving on the threshold of abstraction for years when making interiors. Since 2015 she has been stripping the pictorial space of everything she perceived as anecdotal, leaving behind what she really wants to show: the space itself, the essential solitude of the stage, the light that reveals it. A painting that speaks of both presence and absence, that makes natural and artificial light converge and fills the gaps with the sole vibration of the atmosphere, in a search that unites her unsuspectedly with the best known artist of the 'Light and Space' movement, her compatriot James Turrell.
Of course, Monica Dixon does it through painting, in black and white, and in a space as delimited as that of the painting. Without leaving the canvas she creates a similar illusion of depth and, playing with the lights and shadows, and the planes and perspectives, she forces the participation of the spectator in silent scenes that take place in a room that is generally dark and closed, almost blind, with few possibilities for escape. They are enigmatic scenes but not oppressive and that in addition are painted with extreme neatness, which has been worth him to obtain recognitions like the present one. (…)