Víctor Amela
“It is advisable to have a mission in life,” Francisco Alberoni, the renowned Italian sociologist, an expert in human passion and author of universally popular works such as “Infatuation and Love” and “Having a Mission in Life,” was telling me the other day. What is that? To self-impose to do well what we have decided to do, whatever that may be, Alberoni cleared up for me. A coincidence made me finally understand it the following day when I met again, after ten years without seeing each other, María Gato. I saw her sketches, her paintings, and understood that ten years later, María Gato is still devoted to her art, a proud devotion, happy, intense, with pain and love, with a growing rigor and wisdom.
The mission to recreate the world’s beauty is María Gato’s mission.
María Gato is loyal to her talent, a talent that allows her to conquer forms and reinvent them… for the pleasure of those of us who see her sketches, charcoals, sanguines, inks and oils.
I had that pleasure 10 years ago in Barcelona, when María Gato was a Barcelonian. Of course, she had previously been Brazilian and Galician (always Galician) and later a New Yorker, Miamian, Madrilean… I now know that María Gato is the wandering painter who discovers in her nomadic palette, superimposed, the lights of so many worlds, and also the shadows. Every day María Gato grows richer in lights, wiser in shadows and I see it in her current paintings.
“Art is the way in which the world expresses itself every moment,” gallery owner Soledad Lorenzo recently shared. I think about that when I see María Gato’s nudes, which could seem static but are not, because her vibrating palette makes them move, trembling with life. Because if there is something that defines today’s world it is movement.
And furthermore, there is true music in this artist’s oils. There is saudade. There are bodies and atmospheres and fights and lives that have knitted their universe, a universe penetrated by María Gato’s Atlantic blue eyes, courageous eyes that know their mission.
Víctor Amela
Journalist at "La Vanguardia," Barcelona
Exhibit at the La Coruña City Hall – 1999
Translation from original text in Spanish