EDUARD BIGAS | Suspended Calamities
20 April – 20 May 2007
Private View: 19th April, 6-9pm
The Brick Lane Gallery proudly presents Suspended Calamities, a cycle of the latest paintings by Spanish-born artist Eduard Bigas. Much in the manner of the novels of Milan Kundera, his painting evokes a series of ambiguously intertwined narratives in which the attentive viewer discovers many different and apparently contrary subjective meanings existing in parallel.
Andate, Acrylic and Ink on canvas, 91x61cm
Taking London as his immediate starting point, Bigas’ new series rises and swells around the viewer, one work playing off its fellows in a maelstrom of painterly activity, combining a spontaneous and automatic directness with an accomplished eye for balance, calling forth an eclectic medley of imagination, intuition and feeling. The artist’s distinctive technique shows powerfully in each of these evocative works, imbuing them often with a peculiar resonance of their own-lyrical and gestural, expansive in its scope as it is dense in its emotional significance, marking a complex crossover of senses as abstract and vital as a Tube map.
This range and depth stems directly from a concern of the artist for the smallest and most delicate qualities of his materials. Using only small quantities of acrylic paint and black drawing ink straight onto his canvas, Bigas builds up complex layers of effect with small gentle strokes, slowly moulding unplanned and unexpected forms which are tangible and yet elusive- seeming as heavy as they are ethereal. Bigas also works with the subtle washes produced by very thin layers of acrylic mixed with water, one on top of the other, to produce the most exquisite bruises; sickly green tones here, or transcendental washes of blue there, flood the various canvasses, harkening back to the hey day of Abstract Expressionism, and calling to mind the veils of Morris Louis.
This is but one influence amongst many in Bigas’ painting, and it would take too long to list them all here. However, perhaps one of the strongest threads which laces through many of his works is the eidolon of folk art. This is most evident in the painting included in the exhibition entitled ‘The Death of Pinocchio’. In it, distorted visions of fairytale imagery merge with a play of vertical and horizontal spires of raw tonal quality against a staple backdrop of abstract whiteness. The painting takes on the quality of a strange dream, reminiscent to one of the latter day works of Derroll Adams- where the stage is emptied, and the players are stripped bare of all but the symbols of their status, and their raw suffering.
In these paintings, there is a core sense of valuation for simplicity, balance and beauty. Against a continual lightness, bizarre dreamlike forms, hues and colours weave and interact, suspended in a perpetual and distinct rhythm- or continual fall- either flying high or picking their way across a featureless nothing.
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