Inhabiting art
About the reflective paintings of Monica Dixon

Santiago Martinez - Art critic - La Nueva España, February 2021

At the Guillermina Caicoya Art Gallery we can contemplate the most recent works of Monica Dixon, eleven paintings of different formats made in acrylic on canvas, showing an introspective work that complements her best known work, her solitary houses in wide and infinite landscapes. They show an introspective work that complements the best known work of this creator, her solitary houses in wide and infinite landscapes. The artist takes us towards a more intimate and mysterious territory, unveiled by the nuances that light offers. Already in her last exhibition in this gallery, "Somewhere.... Nowhere "in 2017, we could appreciate works that went in this direction, paintings that relied on minimal architectural structures, dominated by multiple tonalities between black and white that led us, from that sobriety, towards contemplation and reflective analysis that are now manifested in their fullness.
Before these paintings, of an almost photographic figuration, we feel the need to go further, to go into those imagined spaces that the artist offers and that treasure an endless number of previous studies gestated in solitude, recreating cozy interior worlds, whose shelter is of an emotional range, capable of stimulating us sensitively and intellectually. Her formal dexterity is admirable and, through the technical virtuosity that has always characterized her work, she conceives new formal findings of effective and forceful solidity, in them we find the essential, from them we access the transcendent, "making with what there is what there is not" (Javier Utray).
The simple and silent exhibition space of the gallery Guillermina Caicoya, favors the recollection before each work, you have to let yourself go and contemplate them with time, stopping in the rigorous and minimal figuration of their perfect perspectives flooded by lights and shadows that fill the space with suggestions, as happens in Empty walls or Out there II, pieces in which we clearly notice a formal sliding of the artist towards abstraction and that could indicate new ways in her painting, it is surprising how, making us participants in a moment of precise light concentration, we access another plane of aesthetic stimuli and sensations that are difficult to classify. In "Detained spaces " the architectural structures have an imprecise appearance, their nudity provokes that indefinition but, beyond the similarity with the aseptic worlds that the French anthropologist Marc Augé described as non-places -those dehumanized transit zones that repeat aesthetic patterns-, in these acrylic paintings, the charge of the artist's work is the same as in his paintings, in these acrylics, the emotional charge of the author is latent, reverberating in us, nourishing us intimately, offering us new realities, other possible and alternative worlds, attractive landscapes of interiors where we can calm our gaze and compensate for the visual excesses that surround us.
There are paintings in which some chromatic element is incorporated, the color expands through the partitions that limit the vision and channel a light that floods everything with  multiple shades of red and green, vivifying the sober minimalist nudity that characterizes the whole of the sample; in Little red ball or Little red ball 2, the light condensation becomes even more evident impregnating them with connotations and meanings that escape from the rational, it is energy that fertilizes the forms. They recall the importance that, at different times in history, the symbolism of light has had in the field of communication and art, both in its mystical plane and in that referring to the lights of reason, which, in these paintings, seem to converge in a perfect encounter of the immaterial (the spiritual) with matter.
This exhibition is undoubtedly an enriching experience; Monica Dixon's bet is an example of how, from plastic creation, experiences can be unleashed that transcend into unique mental and emotional states, where objective observation weakens little by little before the intangible force of the imagination, where reality and the appearance of things take a back seat to delve into other more essential areas that live in us. The author continues to surprise with a very personal work, capable of combining the love for figuration with an approach to abstraction, as the critic Rubén Suárez said when contemplating the paintings of her previous exhibition in this gallery: "It is a satisfaction for the viewer who always appreciates seeing such reflective paintings that leave, after the first glance, a permanent aesthetic aftertaste"; after visiting "Detained spaces " a deep impression remains in us.

"Detained Spaces", Monica Dixon
Guillermina Caicoya Gallery
C/ Principado 11, Oviedo
Until February 26, 2021

https://www.lne.es/cultura/2021/02/11/habitar-arte-34408864.html