Grilo and Yanai, faces of contemporary life

Paris,

Those who come to the Metropolitan or MoMA in New York in recent months may be surprised to see paintings that they cannot identify alongside the works by Rothko or Tàpies common in the collections of those museums. They are due to Sarah Grilo and have recently been added to their collections, after the Lelong gallery’s branch in that city offered the artist an exhibition focused on her New York period, in 2024.

Previously, the same firm dedicated exhibitions to this author in Paris, in 2018 and 2021, and in that same space we can enjoy “Paris – Madrid” from this Thursday, a set of her works dating from the seventies and eighties, when Grilo was already residing and creating alternating between the French capital, Madrid and Marbella, cities that would be her home until her death in 2007.

Born in Buenos Aires ninety years earlier, in the fifties she began to devise figurative works of Cubist influence, but quickly evolved towards geometric abstraction, marked by her contact with the Association of Modern Artists of Argentina, a collective that exhibited at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.

From 1954 to 1961, Sarah Grilo lived in Paris, where her abstract work acquired a more lyrical dimension, until, in 1962, a Guggenheim fellowship led her to settle in New York; There his creations would take a decisive turn, partly motivated by his immersion in such a dynamic urban landscape and by his discovery of American art of the moment.

The surfaces of his compositions became vibrant by incorporating references to the light flashes of signs and advertisements, as well as numbers, letters, graffiti and advertising slogans that he interspersed with marked drops of paint. She liked to play with permutations, fragmentations and inversions of elements, because, as she said, remembering mathematical principles, The order of the factors does not alter the product.

He fused doodles and symbols when creating, already in the early sixties, an energetic painting in which many find previews of Basquiat’s more than urban art. And when he left New York, Grilo evolved precisely towards greater gestural freedom; Their past figures would be forever replaced by characters and figures on canvas that refer once again, from a radical delicacy, to the graffiti and urban posters of that time when propaganda was, above all, on the street. The city gave this hard-working and reserved artist a security, as she confessed, that pushed her to paint; He continually found in his walks, even in his looks out the window, motifs that could be added to abstract territories.

Although he did not return to figuration over the decades, he did need to bring reality to his works, especially after the push he received in New York that was, in the sixties, an international creative center and almost the cradle of pop art. She was nourished by that energy, but without ascribing herself to specific trends, maintaining her independence, and it is possible that her condition as a foreigner who did not master English had to do with her discursive use of language when exporting reality to the canvas from her American period.

The inscriptions, words and signs that we see in theirs came, as we said, from advertisements or press headlines; and other times, what he found on the urban walls. By applying pictorial glazes on them, he could question the certainty of their messages.

His creative codes were already perfectly consolidated when he settled in Europe, as we will glimpse in this exhibition in Lelong, and he did not try to subject them to evolution or programmatic adjustments: the mere condition of painting prevailed in his works, words aside. This year we will also have the opportunity to meet her again at the Museu March in Palma later.

Guy Yanai. Couple Walking with Bicycle, 2025

Guy Yanai. Young Woman Pouring Milk, 2025

Grilo shares an exhibition in Lelong and in Paris with the Israeli artist, born in Haifa in 1977, Guy Yanai (the first on rue de Téhéran; the second on Avenue Matignon). His paintings are easy to identify: they are distinguished by their saturated tones, their intentional flatness and the purity of their forms; also for the diversity of its sources: from classical and modern painting to cinema, advertising, digital image and social networks.

This saturation of his palette alludes to the lack of subtlety of the visual flow of our days, because his compositions want to represent scenes of contemporary life: domestic interiors, landscapes and fragments of everyday moments reduced to essential planes of color and rhythm. Yanai works by giving the fleeting permanence, with disciplined brushstrokes, but with a human and sometimes poetic pulse.

The clarity of its lines and the calibrated harmony of its tones can suggest stillness in movement and distance in intimacy.