Lucrecia Pascual embarks on a Mediterranean adventure of sun, clarity, luminosity.
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Perhaps a remote cubism penetrates his canvases. Right triangles, straight canopies that the wind has not yet dared to inflate.
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There is stillness in her painting, a calm girl in a sea devoid of waves or unruly foams.
Slender forms make up the world of Lucrecia Pascual, peaked and insunuous, blue or white overlapping planes defy the stellar midday light.
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An exhibition with a chlorine, island presence, but which, from one moment to another - because the calm can turn into a shuddering storm - aboard a mysterious vessel can set sail across the wide sea in search of new adventures.
Coqui Malgrita
Poet
Dear Lucrecia,
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I am taking advantage of this exhibition of yours at the Galeria Antara de Mahón to tell you about it.
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I remember a stanza of a verse that Guillermo Pérez Villalta dedicated to Velazquez, which could also be dedicated to you:
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"I am here and you are there,
you are there looking at me from a reality.
You are the window of what you want me to be.
When you got the idea, the feeling she was there
and you wanted all the spectators like me
they will contemplate it ...
that's why you made it paint ... "
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In this exhibition once again you transmit us the vibration of your sensitivity. Your painting is disciplined and cautious, in which you do not try to capture both the motive and the sensation, (you work with synthesis and with an economy of means that imply resignations: that is, hide to reveal ...) at all times through of the essential you teach us with total simplicity all the reality that you want to transmit to us; your work is a waste of creativity, a constant pulling of the thread ... your art conveys that it is the mind that dictates what to do from emotion, to find your language within a language; a language very close to poetry, a poetry full of color, less literary and more plastic.
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In this marvelous 19th century manor house in Mahón, once owned by a family of notaries, there is the great staircase that leads to the second floor; we meet first in the rectangular room, with your exceptional painting - sculpture brimming with color, with remissive Picassian women; then in the other rectangular rooms your works convey a sensation of calm fresh air, in it the sense of order prevails (it is like a tribute to Gombrich: "The sense of order"), everything you have created and meditated on, where and how you will locate the works, which are where they should be, you have left nothing to chance ... The way you exhibit is also art, so creative art, plus exhibition art create a new art that is visible ... and I refer to the result. Without forgetting your engravings-reliefs ... white as snow that transmit vibration and freshness to us like your painting.
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In the exhibition your conceptual perspectivity is sensed, based on various superimposed transparent layers of oil paint, which can refer us to Rothko. It is not a Renaissance perspective; the vision of your perspective crosses the canvas finding layers of different colors on its way.
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Likewise, emotion, feeling, tension are concepts that cannot be measured and that are not correctable either, but neither is art, as is often signed, totally subjective. These concepts, translated into works, will be difficult to define in words- "words over words" - as José María Valverde liked to say, but this will become more possible when, with our eyes, we try to go deeper to find that meaning and, with it , the correct or most approximate word that determines the work. There are, however, many responses that emotion dictates that have no translation. These emotional responses are often those represented in the chart. We must therefore try, like Agnes Martin's contemplation of the landscape, that knowing how to turn the gaze into thought. "Thinking with the Look".
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For the artist, it will not be about making art ... but about obtaining, through the motivation of his workshop, the feeling of that so abstract that defines, from the indefinable, "the mystery of a presence". Your exhibition refers me to Egypt, in your work we can relate your art to the Nile Valley of some five thousand years ago, as we will see that the Greek artists made their apprenticeship with the Egyptians, and that all of us are students of the Greeks. Hence the art of Egypt has a formidable importance over that of the West.
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The agrarian way of life, on fertile land, posed the problem of property division with the greatest precision and accuracy. This gave rise to the appearance of "geometry" (origin that is revealed in the Greek etymology geometreîn, measuring the earth) and the development of an art, a faithful reflection of geometric mental and visual habits, in which the values ​​of order and composition appear in your paintings.
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The Egyptian world, which through images tried to perpetuate a presence beyond death by creating a double of the original, had a powerful influence on the visual arts and was the origin of the famous "law of frontality." It is a "conceptual" realism (Socrates) that reproduces the "Idea" (Plato), creating a dialogue between the two (Aristotle). Qualities that we can observe in your works.
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Your geometry ... the geometry of the pyramids, those stone mountains that stand like milestones of time on the distant horizon of history, used as tombs of the pharaohs. In Egyptian art, all works are impregnated with the grace of female figures, such as the wall decoration of the Theban tomb of Nebamón. Egyptian painting is flat, the figures are flat, the eyes always look at the viewer like your works that you exhibit in this gallery.
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In Egyptian art it is not based on what the artist could see at a given moment, but on what he knew belonged to a scene or essence of the scene.
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As George Braque said: "In painting, the only thing worthwhile cannot be explained in words"
Ramon Badrinas
Doctor of Fine Arts-University of Barcelona
WHITE TRIANGLES ON BLUE BACKGROUND
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Large blue backgrounds on which white triangles are cut out in dedicated glazes. For this exhibition, the Catalan painter Lucrecia Pascual presents a series of medium-format oil paintings, in which total coherence prevails both in terms of chromaticism and in terms of subject matter. In fact, and to use a musical analogy, we would be facing a series of variations on the same theme.
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In blue as Vasil Kandinsky affirms in his now classic Of the spiritual in art it is the typically celestial color, but in a specific case, the marine landscape inevitably arises from association with the triangular whites. It is as if in this exhibition the painter had wanted to associate her work with the place where the sample is presented. The juxtaposition between both colors is not gratuitous, both transpire purity and immateriality to achieve in this way transmit the restlessness of the atmosphere. As the white and blue submerge, a feeling of calm and tranquility is achieved and a powerful sense of silence develops at the same time. Although the forms are completely abstract, their geometric abstraction has an intrinsic meaning, it would seem that the form becomes the expression of the internal content. Form and color intensely united in an intimate identification with the typical seascape of the island of Menorca: white sails unfurled on the blue waves of the sea.
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With the most traditional elements of painting, the canvas as a support and a great technical mastery of oil, Lucrecia Pascual offers us beautiful and refined images, in which she preferably focuses her attention on the light whose density is born from the relationship between the deep background blues and the bright and transparent whites that are superimposed on them, without venturing into the world of shadows so as not to disturb the difficult light balance achieved.
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We are without a doubt facing a demanding proposal that reflects the formal elegance and technical efficiency of an increasingly complete artist. Lucrecia Pascual achieves through her works exhibited here the synthetic representation of that intense, deep and beautiful Mediterranean Sea.