Fabio MacNamara likes to paint images of virgins in phosphorescent colors and pray to them with devotion. The legendary artist of La Movida left the spotlight and stages years ago, which he only goes up to if he is among friends, but he never stopped painting. Perhaps his true calling? His plastic works are like the texts of his songs, they lack neatness or fine lines, they mix religious iconography with pop-art and glitter, but they are worth it. The Madrid gallery My name’s is Lolita Art opens the exhibition on the 5th Flash & The Pan, in which he brings together 13 of his latest works in which he sheds the bad experiences of his past to become a consolidated painter “with his authentic and unrepeatable attributes and miseries,” in his own words.
«He has something innate that makes him an interesting plastic artist. I especially like its wildest part with very strong strokes, the one where a very well-organized disorder reigns,” says Ramón Alcaraz, director of the gallery. His pop and irreverent Christs have given way to other, more sober canvases, with less marabouts and more holiness. Before conversion (religion has become his refuge) he defended his work as chochonismwhich meant that one paints what one wants and how one can. Now, keep going from what they will say. Flash & The Pan winks at blackstar from Bowie, to his stolen Picasso, the Immaculate Conception and with Blasphemy he even paints with his ass: after spilling acrylic and glitter he spreads it with his butt. In her appearance, Fabiana predicts that his paintings can “become authentic reliquaries, which have healing and artistic power in any gallery that dares to hang them.”
The Madrid of the 80s
Fabio de Miguel (Madrid, 1957) keeps his face sharp as a knife, but he is very, very far from that porn soap opera star who played Patti Diphusa in Labyrinth of passions. He does not go out, he does not take drugs, he goes to daily mass and vindicates the figure of Franco and the maintenance of the Valley of the Fallen. Fabio was always excessive. Too much, even, for himself. He was the king of backfire, the coolest one in Madrid in the eighties. He sang about sewer loves and dreamed of becoming a superficial woman with summers in Usera. Fabio seemed to be everywhere and there are too many stories about him, many unverified. In my memory, I remember him on the stage of the legendary Rock Ola venue, with a light jacket and a blonde mohawk, singing along with Pedro Almodóvar that hymn called I want to be a mom; at the Bobia bar sniffing nail polish or lying on the street, outside the Amnesia nightclub.
He was born on January 8, the same day as David Bowie, something more than a coincidence as reflected well in his painting. He grew up in Ciudad Pegaso, a neighborhood in the Madrid district of San Blas, built for the employees of Enasa, the company that manufactured cars of that name and where his mother worked as a secretary. He worked as a truck mechanic but left (or left) and settled in the Malasaña neighborhood. Not everyone can boast of having received artistic confirmation from Warhol himself. It happened in Madrid (the capital of glory in the eighties) during the exhibition dedicated to the North American artist at the Fernando Vijande gallery, in January 1983. «You are a star», he told her on one of the crazy nights in the city. And Fabio, who already combined painting with music, supported by his friends Costus and Tino Casal, followed his pictorial line. He lived with them on La Palma street, in the Malasaña neighborhood, a source of continuous inspiration. He drank from the transgressive style that pop-art represented but adapted to his own style, always motivated by his impulses and his mood.
Breakup with Almodóvar
Musician (he has recorded seven albums), composer, painter and, above all, provocateur, he was one of the figures who gave birth to what was called the Madrid Movida. He was a fixture in the credits of the first films of a new Almodóvar, such as Pepi, Luci, Bom and other girls of the bunch (1980) and Labyrinth of passions (1982). Together they recorded their first album, How is the service… ladies! and they successfully paraded him around the stages until the director from La Mancha, who was already on his way to the Oscar, got fed up with their sit-ins and they separated.
This could also be told as the story of two close friends whose lives ended up taking radically opposite paths when they separated. While Pedro Almodóvar chained one success after another as a film director, Fabio added rehabilitations. He had been involved in everything, according to his own words, but he came out of the hole alive with the help of his family and friends. He embraced religion and focused his creative force on painting. His previous life, music, composition, cinema and provocation were forgotten, but, coincidences of life, art unites them again in two exhibitions in Madrid. Together but not mixed, the director from La Mancha, Madrid, Almodóvar Girlon the 11th at Conde Duque and Fabio at the Madrid gallery My name is Lolita until the end of July.
