Álvaro del Amo
MARÍA GATO’S PAINTINGS
María Gato’s paintings surprise us because of their seriousness, are admirable because of their colorfulness, and are disquieting because of their original treatment of the setting that surrounds the objects and the figures.
Her portraits present men or women characterized by the simplicity and the strangeness of living. They are there, facing us or sideways, in the restlessness of a concert or the listlessness of a sofa, celebrating the unfathomable normality of existing.
The intensity of the colors, the yellow in its apotheosis, the severe or elegant ochre, contrasting tones here and there, appear from a plentiful luminosity that is simultaneously happy and subdued, elated and restrained.
People and things immediately impose themselves due to a peculiar vision of the air that surrounds them, placing them in a space as imprecise as it is physical, and it would be fitting to say, human. The painter’s brushstrokes capture the ether where women or bottles breathe, as a prolongation of themselves, affirming a humble and blunt reality, serene.
María Gato’s paintings, because of their vitality and the perfection of their realization, seem to bring back a time when paintings captured unrepeatable moments. They offer posterity the smallness and the grandeur of anyone’s everyday reality.
Álvaro del Amo
Writer and Filmmaker
Exhibit at the Inter-American Development Bank
Washington, DC – 2002
Translation from original text in Spanish