DISTANT LIGHT
Santiago Martínez – La Escena – January 2025
“Distant light” is the title of the exhibition that Mónica Dixon presents at the Caicoya Art Gallery in Oviedo. A score of acrylics, among them eight landscapes starring houses, works that, although they keep in a continuing line with respect to previous works, have a more restricted chromatic range, denser skies and a more expressive treatment of the fields based on brushstrokes that refer to the breeze or to some atmospheric effect, as especially noticed in “Kentville” (100×150 cm), the largest acrylic format of the sample. Titles such as “Rossburg” or “Helmville” refer to specific locations in the United States, a clear reference to her own origins, the artist was born in Marlton, New Jersey.
It is evident that Monica Dixon's aesthetic roots are there, in landscapes that we can find in the great prairies of North America, alien to our context; but we also notice that her conceptual and formal configuration is absolutely different, very personal.
In the paintings of our artist, the absence of characters reverts in the one who contemplates them, it is a face to face with the place, with the absence as protagonist and with ourselves. Gaston Bachelard in The poetics of space, states that “the house is a state of the soul”, words that we could use now, they are works that awaken the imagination and stir our inner self.
Complementing these paintings are a series of miniature houses, sculptural pieces handmade from recycled material. Their physicality only underlines the solid and mute presence of these constructions and reminds us of the interest that spatial conception and even, on some occasions, models have in the artist's production.
At the same time, he has been developing a more introspective work. These are essential paintings dominated by lights and shadows. Minimal structures that configure empty spaces and that refer both to a rational analysis of space and a detailed observation of the physics of light, as well as to aspects linked to the world of the subconscious that leads to deeper reflections. Hence, as in the series of landscapes with houses, they are paintings that from a hyperrealistic formal finish lead to metaphysical realms, to an aesthetic in which technical perfectionism is pierced by sensory aspects: the chromatic restriction, the strong light contrasts and spatial ambiguity lead to cross the threshold of the rational, leading us down the path of the unknown. They are acrylics of various sizes -mainly 50×50 cm and 100×100 cm- formats that contribute to the compositional harmony and that are overwhelmed by the expansive character of the perspectives and by a marked tonal gradation, in such a way that the pictorial surface is transformed into an undefined space, a strange place, as reflected in the title of the exhibition that in 2022 will be held in As Quintas, A Caridá: “Vivir en lo extraño” (Living in the strange). This is the case with “Not dark yet, nº 2” and “Not dark yet, nº 3”, two excellent pieces in which the metallic effect of the golden color, another novelty in his paintings, creates atmospheres charged with transcendent connotations that distance his work from the apparent mathematical rigor. Behind the stylistic continuity of his proposals there are always advances, discoveries that configure new atmospheres through light and space. In this sense I want to highlight “A distant utopia”, a work that moves between the real and the dreamlike and that summarizes his new plastic contributions. The spatial emptiness is of an essentiality that approaches minimalism, thanks to the lighting effects a singular spatial ambiguity is generated and the different shades of blue that emerge from the background provide a pleasant feeling of fullness, of serenity, but also refers to the timeless, to what remains, something that José Luis Pastor Calle refers to in the beautiful review collected in the room sheet: “Because the reality that will prevail in the face of our evanescence, are not the individual objects, nor their particular configuration in space, but the space itself and the light that reveals it”.