Lluís Lleó, journey to the heart of painting

MARCO in Vigo presents a monumental and necessary retrospective of Lluís Lleó (Barcelona, ​​​​​​1961), artist who developed a large part of his career in the United States, although he comes from a long saga of Catalan authors. pittore is significantly the title of the show, because its subject is none other than a reflection on painting.

The exhibition allows for a variety of paths and readings, but perhaps there is a starting point, the perfect year (started in 2008 and in the execution phase), located under the panopticon of this former prison. In this key and symbolic location was installed a circular structure covered in terracotta slabs with frescoes.

It is a kind of personal and intimate diary, like those notebooks that artists usually use, but here it gains volume and architectural form. The exhibition can be understood as the unfolding of this work across the rooms in different directions.

One of Lleó's recurring themes is the idea of space as painting and this work is already architecture in itself but, in addition, some of the titles of his pieces refer directly to painting like a roomas Here lives a painter.

Lleó says that, as a child and accompanied by his father, also a painter, he hid in one of the holes in the Romanesque apses of the Museum of Art of Catalonia, which values medieval painting. Entering there was an enlightenment: it was inhabit and be in painting, in a space of the sacred and utopiaof beauty and the sublime. Painting as a cloister or retreat for reflection, silence, dialogue with oneself. This is the meaning of this painter's house.

Painting for Lleó is like a cloister or retreat for reflection, silence, dialogue with oneself.

Another of his recurring motifs is the window, always associated with painting. The meanings are many and some are not externally oriented, but represent an immersion into the painting itself. AND as if the artist cut its surface with a scalpel to find out how it is done insidehow your blood circulates, how your heart beats, to meet your soul.

[The new Spanish painting]

One of the most intense moments of the tour is the giant paper room, fragile and subtle pieces titled with the names of different varieties of an exotic butterfly. It's really, the papers, as if floating in space, are metaphorical butterfly wings which are associated with color –that is what is pictorial– and beauty.

Parallel to this lightness, Lluís Lleó also works with volumetric elements with stone or other materials. It's about ambiguous objects, between painting and sculptureas they are treated with pigments and other plastic procedures.

[Alex Katz, painting but all in all]

The exhibition closes with a gigantic piece, Faith (2023), which has a totemic character, an aspect that is highlighted by the presence of a cross painted on a piece of paper. This is another of the ideas that fly around the set: painting as a space for dialogue with the transcendent. Art such as the painter's house, the windows that look inwards, the butterfly's wings, the transcendent... It is one of the many possible paths in this rare and extraordinary exhibition. A journey to the heart of painting.

Follow the topics that interest you