About
Art Criticism - "Lucía Vidal, The Alive Painting"
Who said that painting is dead? Only a prophet of mistakes could affirm such nonsense. Painting, in all its sensuality of materials and pigments, in all its warmth of color, in all its illusionistic capacity for suggestions, is still valid as evidenced by the work of Lucía Vidal (Madrid, 1976), a young graduate in Fine Arts with immediate recognition in the field of galleries and collectors. Painting has no limits or borders, that is why it is still alive and active along with other artistic manifestations.
With an iconography well integrated to the support, Lucía Vidal cleverly and successfully resolves the background / figure tension that has been presented to every artist since ancient times. In addition to her rigorous series of landscapes in the distance on the city of London, the painter has recently tackled another, reclining characters that seem to gradually emerge from the background of the painting, from the magma of color, with mysterious faces, with ambiguous expressions or absorbed glances. All this constitutes the painter's own world at the same time as the precise pretext for drawing and painting, to carry out paintings in which the line and color are manifested in her indissoluble arm, with precise brushstrokes that are the language of the author.
Lucía Vidal offers the viewer a vital and joyful work; a burning painting paraphrasing the verse of Luis Rosales. Her painting is retinal because it attracts the gaze of the spectator who loves chromaticism, tactility, wanting to guess the juicy mixed technique of acrylic, oil, resins or various pigments, which the author mixes or melts to obtain the desired material result. A painting in which the echoes of Matisse or Klimt's mastery are perceived in a distant and assumed fatherhood. Even the teaching of Picasso when he addresses, for example, the subject of the painter and the model, a subject so dear to the painter from Malaga in the last stage of his days. The teacher absorbed in the beauty of the woman who poses while transferring her to the fixity of the painting, to the mystery of the eternity of art in the face of the contingency of nature.
Genres are not a secret for Lucía Vidal, who has landscapes, figures, nudes, still lifes or portraits in her repertoire, but her workmanship is modern, her diction contemporary, her language of today. That is the rhythm wanted by an artist who, taking the budgets beautiful paintings since the avant-garde of the twentieth century, he knows how to take it to another level by giving her work its own language that is translated into balanced and audacious compositions, in patches and rhythms of color with musical vibrations. That is the greatness of the metamorphosis of art, which is renewed in its aesthetics, being essentially the same.
Lucía Vidal is very well positioned in the eternal sequence of artistic creation.
Julia Sáez-Angulo
Art critic and writer
Press Office
Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports