Carlos León and the call of the tactile, at the MUSAC

Gardens, ponds, attics, passages, balustrades, Háfrika, rooms. They are titles of some of Carlos León’s most significant series, but also terms that the artist associates with places in his life, which were places of knowledge or seduction and that have therefore acquired symbolism for him.

Going into detail, and in the words of the painter, A garden is a Place of simulation (of a paradise from which we were expelled). A pond is a Place of immersion in the hidden. An attic… a passage to certain rooms of memory. They have been scenes of his career since, in his youth, he investigated the possibilities of abstract expressionism and, over the years, achieved coexistence between abstraction and nature that was not necessarily romantic or linked to a need for escape.

Until next October, León offers at the MUSAC the exhibition “Place of praise”, curated by Fernando Castro Flórez: it is not a typical anthology, but it does bring together some of his defining works, pieces whose aesthetics draw as much from those orchards as from accumulations of waste or scrap metal, avoiding the routine. In fact, in León this author, born in Ceutí but linked since his childhood to Segovia, deploys an installation that follows the path of his previous object assemblies, perhaps the least known aspect of his production, and which is composed of old wheels and his own voice pronouncing the piece by Samuel Beckett Cascadinghere linked to the sense of desire and the vital urgency with which she presents her creations.

Carlos Leon. Place of praise. MUSAC

We will be able to review, in the rooms of this center, the pictorial incursions and discoveries that León made his own since the late sixties, from that gestural abstraction with an American imprint and the baroque intensity to the consideration of which surface and support could be identified in the pictorial field or the compatibility of chromatic vivacity and reflective power. The whole of his work is easily identifiable, at the same time that it is built from the gestation of subtle and digitally traced differentiations, derived from changes in rhythm and agitation, from the movement of the body, from the greater or lesser inclination towards the embodiment of the source motif or towards its conversion into an evocative spectrum.

Deep down, in those spaces where this author draws on references (gardens, ponds) there exists above all the ephemeral, that which is susceptible to falling and regenerating and that refers to both passion and death. In each root of a plant a struggle of opposites springs up, what will be shipwrecked and what will be saved; It is no coincidence that some of his latest compositions allude to the mythical fertilization of Danae.

At the MUSAC we will see pieces on fabric, Dibond or wood, various supports in which León has planted blackness, fireflies or organic orchards for contemplation. Time and again, on his canvases, the materiality of the painting itself becomes an access guide to its own terrain: light strokes and games of superpositions generate tactile sensations.