Soledad Sevilla, the sharpness of fine hair

Madrid,

Soledad Sevilla arrived in Madrid in 1966 from her native Valencia and one of the first artists she met in the capital was Eusebio Sempere; They met in the context of the University's Computing Center and began a close friendship. As the author herself recalled in the catalog of the exhibition that the Fernández-Braso Gallery gave to both of them in 2019, at that time their production was considered very cold, and it surprised her, because she glimpsed emotion, beauty in Sempere. and sensitivity, despite the fact that at that time his concerns, and those of other creators of his generation, revolved more around formal discussions than around a theoretical discourse.

For both of them, approaching the Computing Center did not imply so much the adoption of an aesthetic posture as the distancing themselves from the academicism in which they had been trained, which is why for Sevilla, as she herself has pointed out, it meant a round trip: He didn't find his way in technology.

One of the two exhibitions with which the Madrid headquarters of the Marlborough Gallery ends its journey this month is “Between two horizons”, a set of thirty paintings and an installation that Seville carried out based on a small work by the Alicante native, although that origin was diluted in the time dedicated to the production of these pieces, based on work with basic elements of painting, line and color, and with the concept of the horizon.

The first interpretations that the artist carried out of that work by Sempere were made with graphite and in reduced formats and then applied to the brush, to a wide color palette and to larger sizes, those usual in her work. In any case, what the collected works have in common is their rigorous geometries, the result of meticulous processes; the modulation, also very studied, of its tones; and the capture of atmospheric effects, which in both Onil and Seville can evoke a luminosity of a mystical nature (in the case of Valencia, it is also possible to appreciate it in its plant compositions).

Even in these, he has explained that he always works from a line, in abstract parameters and adopting some features of minimalism or American abstract expressionism; He understands that almost everything can be extracted from his stroke, the line: Deep down, starting from the line, which can be tiny, through accumulation or repetition, I play with space and by eliminating unity I allow something different to appear. I have never been figurative.

Sometimes he generates grids from them, as happened in the series he dedicated to his visions of the Alhambra or to the study of Las Meninas; Already at the end of the nineties, these networks disappeared to give way to organic forms (Walls, Apostolate) or to more personal geometries; In any case, in this exhibition that physicality will barely emerge since our gaze will always be directed to its horizontals, whether due to the formal configuration of the pieces or the meaning provided by their titles or their references to the aforementioned concept of horizon, always at the level of the viewer's gaze.

Faced with these works, we will have no choice but to recognize the beauty of the straight line, capable of making us contemplate three dimensions of the horizon, as is evident in the recent installation Pursuit of the tiny, dated this same year and based on the succession of seven hundred round-headed pins, half painted black, arranged on the four walls of one of the rooms in Marlborough. The threads between them give rise to a current that seems to influence the importance of the whole and the one (without a single piece, our perception of the whole would not be the same, and neither would the other way around).

The Madrid gallery scene will not be the same either after the closure of this space, scheduled for the end of this month, although this gallery will soon report on the details, the destination of its inventory and the philanthropic program that they announce to undertake: part of the benefits obtained from the The sale of its funds will be dedicated to non-profit cultural institutions to support contemporary artists. Last April, the board of directors of the firm, with subsidiaries in New York, London, Madrid and Barcelona – previously it also had them in Rome, Zurich, Toronto, Montreal and Tokyo – announced the end of its 78-year history. , initiated by the Jewish immigrant Frank Lloyd, the Austrian book dealer Harry Fisher and David Somerset, when he was not yet Duke of Beaufort.

They began working with impressionist, post-impressionist and modern French works, later expanding their field to the great authors after World War II, such as Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Ben Nicholson, Frank Auerbach, RB Kitaj, Barbara Hepworth, Eduardo Paolozzi, Paula Rego and Graham Sutherland. The Madrid headquarters of Marlborough opened its doors in 1992, and the Barcelona one in 2014; In the first, along with that Soledad Sevilla exhibition, pieces by Rita Ponce de León and Navarro Baldeweg await us, within the project “In response to gravity.”