An ongoing exhibition at Galerie Isa brings together the works of three artists from Spain’s sun-kissed Mediterranean island of Mallorca. The group show, Spanish Interlude, which features works by Amparo Sard, Nicholas Woods and Guillermo Rubi, offers a glimpse into each artist’s signature style and artistic practice while engaging with landscapes and natural elements.
A collaboration between Galeria Pelaires, Mallorca’s first gallery entirely devoted to contemporary art, and Mumbai’s Galerie Isa, the exhibition showcases 14 artworks that cover a range of media and styles that seem to follow in the footsteps of noted Spanish artist Joan Miró, known to upset the conventions of art. Through the “assassination of painting”, the painter-sculptor-ceramist unshackled art from its bourgeois associations. It is fitting, then, that Miró’s first individual show in Mallorca was held in Galeria Pelaries in 1970.
Sard, Woods and Rubi employ individual techniques and styles of abstraction to convey drastically different tones of nature.
Sard perforates her works to create intricate patterns. With ‘Tree of Life III’, she uses a sheet of acrylic glass. It’s a particularly striking piece owing to its relatively large size, featuring a fascinating merge of negative and positive spaces. The tree’s trunk is defined by the perforated areas surrounding it, but what stands out is the way in which these leaves blend into the birds flying around the tree’s form, which occupy the positive spaces of the piece, just as the tree trunk does. The effect in the end appears to be as if the tree bursts into a flock of birds.
Woods’s arrestingly different treatment of trees stands in contrast to Sard’s. An American who moved to Mallorca in 2009, he depicts landscapes using pigment powder, predominantly in reds and browns. “It’s extremely difficult working with pigment powder directly,” says gallery director and the exhibition’s curator Ashwin Thadani. “But the technique gives the painting a lovely velvety finish.” The pigments bleed onto the surface and take on its unique textures, giving the smoky images a certain mysterious, dream-like quality. Woods’s works transcends the conventional viewing of landscape paintings by engaging the viewer in a mystical dialogue with nature.
Rubi’s pieces are a unique interpretation of landscapes on canvas. The Mallorcan native developed a unique style of contouring his works, using acrylic and enamel on canvas and aluminium to distort images in an almost digital manner through contrasting yet mellow colours. Three of Rubi’s works on display are from his Landing Cliffs series. They depict landscapes as contours of their forms in a style that resembles physical maps that are further fractured through uniform bands of paint.
The collection is a fascinating tour of innovative visual artistic practices and forms of expression in Mallorca. The artists’ three individualistic styles are reflective of Miró’s own attempts to expand the boundaries of painting and serve as a sample of its immeasurable creative possibilities.
Spanish Interludeat Galerie Isa, Fort, till August 24.
The writer is in intern with The Hindu
