Landon Metz in Parra & Romero, control and his resignation

His language is constantly abstract and minimalist, but he has managed to give it dynamism: he is the author of paintings that suggest expansion, one favored by its serial nature and by a conception of space as a possibility and not as a limitation.

Landon Metz, an artist born in Arizona forty years ago and currently living in New York, has approached his creations from the desire to break polarities in them, such as those that separate the viewer from the pieces and the place through which he passes or those that establish iron walls between the personal and the collective. For more than ten years he has presented individual exhibitions in Norway, Italy, Denmark and Canada; among the most notable, those derived from his stay as a resident at the ADN Collection in Bolzano in 2014 or that offered to him, in 2018, by the Pietro Canonica Museum in Rome. His participation in collectives has also taken him to centers such as the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York or the Villa Medici. In both cases he reflects his sensitivity in handling scale and the sculptural approaches that bring movement to his compositions, as well as his use of very specific display strategies that work in favor of his pieces, such as the incorporation of rhythm or repetition.

Metz’s work consists primarily of multi-panel paintings that he structures as diptychs or triptychs and that he sometimes arranges contiguously, extending or wrapping around the corners of rooms, but he also designs canvases with shapes that imitate the abstract developments present in other works.

Landon Metz. Parra & Romero Gallery, Santa Gertrudis, Ibiza

Landon Metz. Parra & Romero Gallery, Santa Gertrudis, Ibiza

The American stars in the summer exhibition at the Parra & Romero gallery’s headquarters in Santa Gertrudis, in Ibiza, in what is his first time in Spain. This montage consists of half a dozen unpublished pieces, all of them dated this year 2026, in which he has sought to explore the relationship between chance, control and the physical properties of the pigment on the canvas, trying to add the human figure to these fabrics without deviating from the principles that have defined his practice until now; rather expanding his vocabulary and his investigation of the confluence between matter and the figures it generates.

In the works gathered here the bodies seem to emerge slowly, illuminating the beginning of extensive fields of color. These forms emerge and disappear simultaneously, without attempting to portray a specific being, but rather becoming the start of an inquiry into questions associated with individuality and interconnection.

It’s essential to keep in mind his processes: Metz pours pigment directly onto raw, unprimed canvases, allowing gravity, fabric absorption, moisture, and evaporation to play an active role in the construction of each image. The result is surfaces where control and renunciation of it coexist and that are testimony both to the painter’s deliberate action and to the forces that escape his control.

All of the same format, these six compositions feature those large surfaces of color, while the areas of bare canvas generate a constant tension with the areas of pigment. His methods seem simple, but demonstrate a delicate balance between competing notions, such as appearance and disappearance, weight and lightness, fullness and emptiness; terms that, despite their opposition, remain independent faces of the same reality.

These works particularly resonate with the experience of light, space and detention that we can associate with the island of Ibiza. They invite the public to a slow and attentive contemplation, in which the gaze can focus both on the physical qualities of the pigment and on what remains difficult to define. In short, Landon Metz proposes that we pay attention to the material, the gesture and the very act of being present.