Rebeca Plana: Begin the Beguine

Alejandro Guijarro: 36 Views from Within

Begin the Beguine is Rebeca Plana’s first exhibition as a represented artist in Álvaro Alcázar gallery. Ten new, large-format works and realized in the previous months exclusively for this show, are display representing a shared desire: to start again.

The 195 x 162 cm paintings reveal the fluid and fast gestural imprint that characterizes the artist, whose practice is highly direct and fresh. These works are made on linen, a completely new medium for the artist, who, despite considering it complex, admits that it “has a lot of presence” and confirms her interest and curiosity in the use of different materials.

Her practice highlights the diversity of colors and their importance in transmitting numerous sensations. They work as a reflection of the inputs that the artist receives on a daily basis. She reuses, almost as a let motiv, the color green for example, is a color which makes her feel comfortable and consideres it as a reflection o a “wonderful magic”.She also uses the fluorescent orange that, according to her, puts in a latent way and provides that light which is much needed today in contrast to other more stormy colors.

Rebeca Plana should be addressed as an in-formalist artist and her paintings are a reflection of her passionate and rapturous character. She considers that her own essence is painting, therefore she paints because she has to paint and she can do it from the needle but it always has to be in calm conditions: “I like to say that I paint from the stomach and not from the heart , because the anger comes out of your guts, even if you are learning to control it”.

In this period of wide uncertainty, each one focuses on their ability and Rebeca Plana knows how to paint and express her feelings. She starts again.

The photographer Alejandro Guijarro, for his exhibition in Álvaro Alcázar gallery, displays 36 images where photography is shown at its intersection with other media such as painting or print. His creative process reveals a technique closely related to surrealist painting: decalcomania.

This technique, so widely used by artists such as Óscar Domínguez or Max Ernst, among others, is known as one of the so-called mechanical or automatic painting processes. Using a now obsolete type of instant film and its chemicals process such as pigments, Alejandro Guijarro brings this technique to the field of photography, blurring the line between the real and the fictitious, between the tangible and the imagined: “this work establishes a fictitious space. From my study, I document the world with my eyes closed”.

The artist breaks the limits of the photographic image and creates a fragmented relationship between the object and its representation. Thus reality and his visual experience are further questioned. In this way, the artist manages to create a series of landscapes that honor Katsushika Hokusai and his 36 views of Mount Fuji. He considers it an interior journey through landscapes that have a geographical reference and invites us as spectators to create our own journey.

CATALOGUE
PRESS DOSSIER REBECA PLANA
PRESS DOSSIER ALEJANDRO GUIJARRO