Lita Cabellut, a celebration of spring

Madrid,

The international projection of Lita Cabellut's painting has multiplied in recent years, especially since in 2021 she received the recognition of Artist of the Year in Holland, where she resides, but this author, born in the Huesca town of Sariñena in 1961 and raised in Barcelona, has nearly four decades of artistic career: she moved to the Netherlands before she was twenty, studied at the Gerrit Academy Rietveld of Amsterdam, dedicated to Fine Arts and Design, and has settled in this country since then; She has been living and working in The Hague for years. Although painting is her fundamental language, she has also cultivated sculpture, installation, photography, video, performance or graphic work; She has also created sets for operas and writes poetry.

Cabellut now has a gallery in Madrid: until June 8, Opera Gallery exhibits unpublished compositions inspired by the so-called Mayan Festival, which takes place at the beginning of this month in many Spanish towns and celebrates the arrival of spring , embodied in a girl or young woman who is dressed with a crown and various floral decorations; Sometimes she sits on a makeshift altar and other times she sings or dances through the streets receiving tips. Although the exact origin of this rite is unknown, it is already mentioned in medieval literature, so it is possible that it had even more ancient roots; even that it not only celebrated the season of flowers, but also the feminine and fertility.

Lita Cabellut. The girl in the look. Opera Gallery

The pieces gathered in this room on Serrano Street are eighteen portraits, medium and large format canvases: complex compositions that are characterized by a relatively austere handling of color, despite its theme, by the fragmentation of the fabric through lines. verticals -Castro Flórez refers to them as tears– that provide a contemporary look at this issue linked to tradition, and for its funds never detailed, whose reasons cannot be fully appreciated. The treatment of issues of a social nature or related to human anthropology is common in Cabellut's creations, as is a formal approach to his paintings that oscillates between a look at the past and current techniques.

In this case, the incorporation of girls who symbolize the beginning of life and the hatching of flowers (Poppy, Mariselva, Centella either Carnation are some of their names) serves the artist to also make them embody attitudes typical of artistic work, such as play, freedom, the capacity for wonder or irony. From that perspective, she seems to delight in capturing her smooth faces, with expressions that oscillate between grace and impudence, and her partly Goyaesque, highly ornamental dresses. They are images of both initiation (of the life cycle) and rebirth (of the season that we consider most joyful) and an invitation to observe in detail, and obtain visual pleasure, from the rites anchored in time and surely born for catharsis. .