Mònica Castanys (Barcelona, 1973) present her recent artworks in the new exhibition "Synesthesia" that will take place in Anquins gallery from 16th September to 30th October 2021.
From the second half of the twentieth century a good part of the alternative to artistic officialdom was taken on by a certain type of pictorial figuration that had nothing (or almost nothing) to do with tradition. I am referring, for example, to that controversy surrounding among a group of American artists in the 1960s who were concerned about the hegemony of abstraction and the lack of an alternative which, according to them, led to the emergence of Pop Art. Critics of the time, such as Sidney Tillin, were the first to formulate what we now know as New Realism, which broadly aimed to direct the gaze of the viewer to the outside and not the subjective interior of the artist; to purge the painting of connotation and centre it in pure denotation; in factual, specific meanings. This enterprise was by no means easy and could only be done from the most aseptic formalism – in other words from a place in which the painting was void of gesturing and which was inevitably twinned with the medium of photography.
As a result the art market (which is often more sensitive to social movements that the artistic institution itself) has always remained alert to this process of pictorial renewal which would move from naive historicism to the indifferent, impassive execution of a world perceived as surprising. But there was also a third path taken by artists such as Mònica Castanys (Barcelona, 1973): her figuration shares with New Realism the desire to approach a visible reality but to do so without rejecting the age-old dream of passing it through the filter of subjectivity which, ultimately, cannot be rejected. It is for that reason that “the dream of the artist” as written by Perejaume in The Work and the Fear, would be to have the time and the space in which we live at our fingertips. It is a question of that: imagining that our gesture does not only not cause unnecessary violence in the world but is a natural reflex – a cause and effect, pure simultaneity that translates the secret rhythms of life so that we can have access to them.
This, by the way, is a completely unheroic life: a life written in lower case but made from light and shadow, from time and that infinite capacity that places and objects have to bring to the present any event from the past. In her journey, Mònica Castanys has found the best way of getting closer to the diversity of the real in a way which is similar to that propounded by Francisco Jarauta: “It is of no importance that this discovery of the other involves emotion or unease, surprise or enthusiasm: in all cases it is the result that can only be produced by a journey”. The last phase is obviously to let the dust settle or to ruminate what has been contemplated from the safety of the studio: that is the only place where Castanys uses painting to translate what she has seen but also, and more especially, what she has felt. In the words of Tu Weiming, “the ultimate meaning of life is found in our ordinary human existence”.
Eudald Camps
Crític d’art
Art critic
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