The paintings in the Fake Abstract series come from an experience of the material (like all ideas). One painting leads you to another painting, and the beginning of Fake Abstract lies in the bursts of color and interventions that I practiced in previous series on realistic images.
For me, the most interesting feature of human reality is the perpetual clash between novelty and heritage. Something similar to what we call the «generation conflict», but on a larger scale.
I tried to represent in one piece of canvas the struggle of contradictory ideas that we have in our society. This is called dialectical philosophy, which in real life means something like «Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about».
Everyone has an opinion, so there is no way to avoid a certain degree of stress in the way history develops in a society itself or against other societies and cultures. Moreover, the idea of Fake News is perhaps only one aspect of this struggle between conflicting interests.
Applying these ideas to painting, I come to the conclusion that a single style cannot represent the confusion of our reality. So I paint a single picture as if two different people were working on it. Yes, this is a degree of schizophrenia, but it is found everywhere.
So we get this:
In one part of the painting I follow a classical technique by copying in oil, portraits presenting the academic idea of beauty, traditionally represented by a female image. There is no need to say it... this concept of beauty is the most ques- tioned, forgotten in fact by the academy of contemporary art.
The rest of the image is a brilliant, flat and nihilistic abstraction that lets us see, through a simple line, a small fragment of a disappearing reality.
Both styles are... pure decoration, pure Academy, pure Fake.
Lino Lago.
In short :
Lino Lago was born in 1973 in Redondela, Spain. After a long stay in Lithuania, he now lives in Madrid. He graduated from the University of Madrid, painting section in 1993.
His paintings are part of several important collections such as the Harvard Business School, the Flint Institute of Arts, the MEAM Art Museum, the Barcelona Fundacion Abanca Bank and many others. He is also the recipient of the pres- tigious BMW Painting Competition prize from the Queen of Spain. His work appears in several prestigious internatio- nal publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Architectural Digest or Vogue Italia, and is also presented in Fuera de Serie magazine as one of the great promising names in contemporary art.
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