VALENCIA. When the artist Maria Aranguren The possibility of holding an exhibition at the Bancaja Foundation was put on the table, it was one of the requests he made to the president of the institution, Rafael Alcon: “I asked for time.” The request was not trivial, as she had an ambitious project in her hands that forced her to calmly review her own work and creative process. “At a time in life when we are all going crazy, I have had time. Making this stop has been really interesting, even to learn more about my own work and how I refer to patterns,” the artist reflected during the presentation of the exhibition, which can be seen at the cultural center until next October.
This time of reflection, therefore, has been key to shaping Genesisa project that offers a look at the last twenty years of the artist’s production with a selection of works that also includes new pieces, proposing a journey through that “restless spirit in permanent search of new paths”, as reflected by Alcón, which characterizes the artist. Curated by Gertrude GomezThe exhibition is made up of fifty works, dating from 2002 to 2024, which reveal the artist’s particular relationship with the creative process, with experimentation and with play, a game that she takes very seriously, she noted, and which has led her to find innovative solutions.
He has done so, however, from a starting point that goes back to the most classic processes.Genesis “It has always been conceived as a creative process, in which we have wanted to pay homage to ‘painting-painting’”, stressed the curator, who defined Aranguren as a “classical” painter. At least in certain aspects of her approach to the work of art. And it is precisely this return to the origin, this look at the foundations of her artistic production that marks this exhibition project, which feels like a review of her work, but not as a retrospective in the usual sense, but as a way of understanding her present and those elements that identify and make up the story of her career through time.
“When you want to start new projects you always come back to yourself, to your nest. Inevitably I always have to go back to those structures and to my base, which is color and composition,” the artist reflected. With an artistic expression in which the emotional goes through the filter of geometry, the journey shows a creative universe formally marked by an austere but “firm” use of color, as well as by the limits between abstraction and figuration.
The selection of pieces reflects María Aranguren’s ability to experiment with materials such as canvas or cardboard, with the use of cellular polycarbonate taking on special importance since 2008. This industrial material allows the artist to unfold a new meaning in her painting using a light support formed by the union of two plastic layers that create hollow structures inside that Aranguren intervenes with different materials and techniques, lines that she uses as a form of artistic expression. However, Aranguren makes a second request, in this case to future visitors of the exhibition, and that is to visit it. with “open ears” and let yourself be carried away by those pieces that form a puzzle called Genesis.
