Soledad Sevilla waiting for Sempere

Alicante,

Parallel lines, very close to each other, that unfold, meticulously and completely occupying the surfaces of the canvases, provoking vibrations with effects close to hypnosis. These are the lines that define Soledad Sevilla’s most recent series – White horizons, Blue horizons, Agnes Martin and Waiting for Sempere-, pieces that constitute the center of the exhibition that adopts the title of the last of these groups and that can be visited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante. MACA.

The origins of this center are closely linked to Sempere himself, also from Alicante, who met the Valencian Seville in 1960, a long friendship arose between them that was somewhat related to the interest of both in the line and the possibility of structuring with it geometries that did not have to be severe, but could become soft and emotional.

Sempere died in Onil, where he was born, in 1985, but this author’s affinities with him did not end then. His most recent series, and very obviously Waiting for Sempereare inspired by him and also pay homage to him in new lines and lights that coexist in rigorous compositions.

The MACA exhibition, curated by Rosa Castells, begins with images of Seville from the seventies from the collections of this institution, research around modules and variations; grids determined by symmetries, rotations and displacements. These theoretically repetitive forms are presented in positive and negative and are expanded on transparent supports, such as acetate, using reprographic techniques, so they give rise to dualities: between up and down, right and left.

Somewhat later, at the end of the seventies, Seville undertook a series of canvases with a white background, sometimes diptychs, in which these plots or grids emerged from the repetition of a single linear element with a vocation for infinity; and comparable to a flight or flight when done diagonally. In the last of these pieces, dated 1980, this module is the king of an entire surface.

But the journey immediately plunges into those latest images, large format and yet – we will have the sensation – with a tendency to expand. Threads and filaments seem to unfold beyond their measurements, even enveloping the viewer, and yet they do not stop serving introspection.

Soledad Sevilla (waiting for Sempere). MACA, Alicante

In your Tribute to Agnes Martin (2023) paid tribute to the linear plots, always warm, of the American, but also to the texts in which he formulated that geometry It is the path to that plane of attention and consciousness in which the mind knows what the eye has not seen.. The MACA is the first space where these works reach the public.

The series Waiting for Semperefor its part, arose from the degradation of color, from testing with techniques and sizes. This need to experiment, to work from trial and error, explains the fact that Seville always creates around projects: In just one painting I don’t say everything I want to say, I need more paintings, more moments. Ideas are difficult to develop, they are almost like a book, like a novel that is structured by chapters, by stages; There is something to tell there and you have to do it in steps. (…) Once that image is close to or similar to what I want to achieve, there is also a lot of work to develop and perfect it, to exhaust it.

Both these works and the sets blue horizons and white horizons (2022-2024) were born from the contemplation of a small gouache from Alicante that precisely belongs to Seville. In those years, the artist moved her studio to Granada while she remained in Madrid with only some pencils and Sempere gouache.

Her reflections on the concept of the horizon bore fruit in some graphite sketches on paper and, later, in large-format canvases where the artist reviews with acrylic, freehand, lines that she had previously drawn with the help of a parallelex. In these works with a white background, it is these gray or blue lines that define the space; Horizontal, vertical or diagonal lines mark a visual path and open soft variations that produce vibrations that are not ethereal, but evident.

Sevilla’s work process, which involves walking the canvas while painting, gives rise to small deviations, errors in quotes or excess ink that she naturally assumes as an essential part of the final result. He does not deny the gesture in his geometric abstractions, although he contains it.