A few days ago, it was inaugurated in the Jerez Fish Market Room a great exhibition of Villamartín artist José Carlos Naranjo, one of those young painters who already occupy an important position in the national artistic panorama for a forceful work, of great depth and bearer of all the values of great contemporary painting. A very large group of artists gathered in the Jerez municipal hall: Ana Barriga, Eduardo Millán, Ramón Muñoz, Víctor González, Laura Vinós, Juanma Benítez, Pablo Castañeda, Amara Toledo, Rocío Cano, Elena Núñez, Antonio Sobrino, Manolo Mesa , among others; most of them very, very young, who are contributing a lot of quality to an Andalusian art that opens expectantly to the best of the best. This small group of artists is nothing more than a minimal part of the group of creators that exists throughout Andalusia.
At this moment, the three Faculties of Fine Arts are contributing artists, creators who are aware of its moment and that seek to reflect a new art, without restrictions, safe and without complexes. All of this means that the whole of Andalusian art is based on a group of lucid and well-prepared artists, who manifest the truth of a contemporary art that, until now, had many illusory approaches, without a real, well-defined supporting base. and open to any possible outcome. Definitely, an art that we consider wise, far from self-serving impostures and maddening occurrences. We have already said on numerous occasions that we are in a moment of absolute magnificence and that this reality must be taken into account, from all sectors, to bet on an art that raises infinite expectations.
In this sense, and to reflect on this line of verification of a reality that has no turning back and that leads us through the great moment of the art that is made in Andalusia, in general and in the province of Cádiz, in particular, we can point out what has happened in the Vázquez Díaz Scholarships of the Provincial Council of Huelva. Scholarships, created more than thirty years ago with the clear objective of promoting the artistic creation of young people Andalusian authors; prestigious event that has sponsored, over the years, the work of artists who, today, are already a true reality in the national art scene as a whole. Two young Andalusian artists have been the winners: Rosa Aguilar from Granada and the San Fernando painter Silvia Lermo. This artist we have been following since his magnificent exhibition at the Sala Rivadavia in Cádiz and who later, we had the opportunity to see in his extraordinary appearance at the Madrid gallery My name’s Lolita, one of the most important on the national exhibition scene.
The project presented by the artist from the Island of León, ‘Between the salt and the wind’places us in the author’s very personal imagination through which a series of elements taken from the artist’s environment are the protagonists of a story marked by a reality that, without being completely mediated, breaks the usual rhythm of what the eye captures. and enters a universe where everything is subject to an existence between the real and the imagined.
Silvia Lermo’s work, figurative and full of appropriate formal approaches, does not stop only at the extreme developments of an exacerbated and effective realism; Rather the complete opposite, creates a personal universe that transcends beyond the illustration of reality itself. Her painting reveals an artist prepared in every sense; without empty formulations that interest no one or stories adjusted to the simple development of the concrete. It uses found images, nearby settings, elements that are in the artist’s living circle, her friends, domestic animals. Silvia Lermo is the author of a very special, very well-defined animal park, which is unique, personal and non-transferable and one of the identifying marks of the author-; With all this she manages to interpose an intimate landscape where convincing actors intervene, marking the coordinates of a painting full of entity and transcendence.
It is not surprising that Silvia Lermo’s project has stood out. She is a convinced artist who creates a painting that leaves no room for doubt.
I once wrote that ‘Silvia Lermo presents us with a reality against the current. The characters inhabit a silent world, almost alien to a real existence, which only manifests fragments of a universe of memories. The work moves, restless, transports to mediate spaces that appear as scenes of a life where humanity unravels actions that are reborn after having lost the nature with which they were conceived.’ I have no doubt about it. The artist has her own language; a language that moves away from the egalitarian postulates that abound so much in current art; She is a total artist, a creator who is aware that she knows very well what she wants and that she also knows how to deliver it in a personal and unique way.
The Daniel Vázquez Díaz scholarship is right in the designation of this artist who is part of that active, important and important group of young Andalusian art.
