Maria Gato y Victor Amela, writer and journalist
MARÍA GATO IN THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD
An artist is someone who makes the invisible visible. That’s what María Gato achieves: she shows you what you didn’t yet know you should see, she paints it in her canvases. That’s how María Gato beautifies the world.
María Gato has a hypnotic Atlantic gaze, blue eyes that are Brazilian, Miamian, and Galician at the same time, but with her own very personal glow. And it’s with that glow that she illuminates a universe that’s no other than a projection of her flowing and dreamy soul, inhabited by signals that come to her in the form of naked bodies, paths and horizons, multicolored kimonos, musicians and surgeons, wide-eyed women, urban landscapes suspended in time and space…
Because in María Gato’s paintings everything is sensual, but of a sensuality that is imminent, softened in a diaphanous and ethereal placenta, of a spiritual beat.
When you enter María Gato’s home studio you understand that the artist is painting around herself the map of her own world, that sometimes is colored in brushstrokes that are sometimes copper and golden, at other times earthy, and inflamed in some fiery canvases, and subdued in other foggy passages that Turner would bless. And in all those brushstrokes, all of them, beat the vibrations that not even she knows where they come, from where they burst, but that emerge from her soul, tremble in her hands and surround her with beauty.
And that’s where María Gato lives every day, who every once in a while has the deference to share this beauty with all of us, such as here and now. Thank you, María.
I’ve been with María Gato very few times in the past 30 years, which is how long I’ve known her… and she already painted. Which is why I can attest today, when we’ve met again, to her obvious determination as an artist: María Gato is tenacious in her ambition to surround herself with beauty and to share it with those of us who know how to appreciate it, as in a high and noble cause and as if there weren’t anything more important to do in the world. And surely, there isn’t.
That is why María Gato’s sky blue eyes continue to hypnotize me and why I see how here light envelops every one of those canvases, the lines of her charcoals and blood oranges, the curves of her drawings and oil paintings, the throbbing mosaic of her brushstrokes. Because I now know that María Gato is in this world to paint and that’s why I know that she’ll continue painting, because there’s still a wide intimate universe to paint, much beauty to express, and she’ll paint it and won’t be able to not share it.
María Gato, from within and quietly, will continue beautifying the world.
Víctor Amela