We present a new exhibition of Miguel Peña in our gallery, consisting in a selection of works on canvas, wood, cardboard or paper ha has been preparing during the last couple of years.
His work keeps presenting distorted images, architectonic spaces inhabited by characters that look like sculptures, creating compositions closer to mythology or the ancient Greece rather than contemporary art. His painting, nevertheless, has also the influence of the avant-gardes and a sensuality that gives them a very personal feel.
Peña likes to undress the characters to take any temporal reference from them. He plunges his figures into deep, dense situations. The loneliness, meditation and contemplation with which he locates them into the composition evoke the most intimate places of the human being. Situated in architectures that look utopian, in archeological scenarios in ruins, in front the see, they seem to be sleeping, petrified.
The chromatic spectrum of Peña is clearly Mediterranean. Although he lives far from the sea, it appears in his chromatism where earthly ochres and greys of stone or moonlight predominate, and can be completed with blue from a glimpsed sea or touches of green and red.
The work of Peña takes inspiration maybe from his dreams, but also from a deep knowledge of art history and architecture. The neoclassical Pablo Picasso or Georgio De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings are the more obvious, but surrealism is always underlying in his oeuvre with small disturbing details that give a perturbing appearance to many of his paintings. He is not the only artist from his generation to use this approach when working, Jorge Gay, also an artist from our gallery, as well as Guillermo Pérez Villalta or the Scenzi/Mañas couple, also move in this direction, a bit in the middle of surrealism and metaphysical painting, always figurative and with a mythological aura that gives them some kind of timeless quality.
The exhibition of Miguel Peña can be visited until April 12th
