Maria Lara

María Lara ( Loja, Granada, 1940 ) has developed since the early seventies a body of work focused on sensory and emotional impressions of all kinds, which in her work are translated into simple and powerful elements – very often bands and lines – which, on the one hand, synthesize these perceptive effects, and, on the other, convert them into pure plasticity (…)

Her concise compositions emphasize the self-referential pictorial quality advocated by Greenberg and exemplified by the concepts of color field painting or all-over painting, without making concessions to illusion or anecdote. With an economy of means, given that she almost exclusively uses lines and bands of various colors, the artist from Granada manages to capture a synthetic and refined language on canvas and paper. But, despite this conscious restriction in the means and spellings that she rigorously uses in her work -her method of working may seem severe and even rigidly programmed at first sight-, the result is highly emotional and evocative.

In this way, the paintings and drawings of María Lara present a high value and chromatic subtlety; in her works, the color vibrates intensely in the succession of vertical or horizontal lines that make them up. Apparently silent, his pieces call for an interiority and intimacy far removed from the spectacular or the anecdotal, and focus on an abstract and refined intensity that, far from detracting from emotion, conveys impressions as vivid as they are insightful and everyday sensations related to ineffable matters such as light, air, spatial reverberation, everyday life or spirituality, among others. Eliminating all kinds of illusionism, there remains a powerful and apparently flat pictorial reality that affects the perceptual level, emitting visual and also tactile vibrations that alter the flatness until reaching a perceptive opening that makes the materiality of painting and drawing such, but also transfigured substance.

(Fragment of "Luz prolongada. La trayectoria artística de María Lara", Manuel Olveira)