Antonio Montalvo .- Cizaña crecida
15/Sep/2012 - 08/Dec/2012
Cizaña crecida (high darnel), expression used by Isaak Bábel in his work Red Cavalry, is the title that ANTONIO MONTALVO has chosen for his second solo exhibition at Espacio Mínimo gallery. Not just rich and resonant, the title is always for him a formal part of the work.
About the paintings in the exhibition and his general work ANTONIO MONTALVO explains the following:
An exhibition of my work is no more than a painting reunion, I never work around series. That is why there is no subject for this show, it can’t be one.
A painter is subject to unpredictable and confusing messages that, in lack of something better, could be called intuitions. There is no point to search for meaning where it can’t be: I don’t know why I paint a canvas. However, instead of painting to erase any doubts, I do it to get into them. Art general task, and painting in particular, is to find a form of expression for what cannot be verbalized. Painting is the receptacle of the ineffable. And there is nothing else; that is why, regarding the works exhibited, it could be said that they are in the same place that Judith is of Bartók, in the castle of Bluebeard, when she asks to open the last one of the seven doors. They point at the melancholic sadness that originates the memory of a lost joy. I consider pictorial thought strictly inseparable of deep and indestructible melancholy. I miss a previous condition, real or imaginary, and the vital path of these works wants to “signify” the experience of this melancholy and the vital capacity to overcome it. This chejovian impossibility of happiness points irremediable to what I expect to be the Gordian knot of my work: the subtle beauty, almost imperceptible, of human sorrow that only music seems to achieve, and the anguish of a human creature desiring for redemption. At this point, I can’t find another aspiration, another subject of my painting. And there is no more than this, a gentle resignation, a reciprocal and saddened piety.
ANTONIO MONTALVO (Granada, 1982), is BA in Fine Arts by the University of Granada. He has participated in group exhibitions such us Certamen Andaluz de Artes Plásticas 2006, Premios Injuve para la Creación Jóven 2007, Circulo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, Generación 2008. Premios y Becas de Arte Caja Madri, and in international art fairs such us ARCOMadrid, ZonaMACO in Mexico, ART.Bo in Bogota or Ch.ACO in Santiago de Chile. His work is presend in the Spanish public collections Fundación Rodríguez-Acosta, Fundación CajaSur, Fundación Coca-Cola, Colección Caja Madrid, Colección Entrecanales, Instituto Andaluz de la Juventud, Museo Gustavo de Maeztu and Facultad de Bellas Artes of Granada.
