After her participation in 2020 in the second Cuarto de Invitados, the Cantabrian artist Amaia Bregel returns to our Santander gallery with her latest works, in which she continues to express her interest in geometry and modular sculptures, always with her own personal approach to painting.
As a result of an intense research on the pictorial material, she “unhooks” the pigment from the traditional canvas, getting the colour to fill the spaces generated by the structures built with thin wooden rods and allies itself with the light to be projected on the walls. These volumes carefully designed in drawings and previous studies become constructions that in many cases share a sculptural character with a vocation for utopian architecture, generating spaces dominated by the harmony of number and the softness of colour.
This quality of symbolic habitability is the reason for the title Orden y morada (Order and dwelling). Etymologically, “morada”, from the Latin morari, means to stop, to linger, to stay, to remain. The “morada” is therefore the place where you stop voluntarily, where you linger and linger, it is a place to stay and recover. It must be acknowledged that this type of locus amoenus (idyllic place) is, increasingly in these times, a not inconsiderable aesthetic proposal.
In this exhibition, Amaia goes beyond objects, as some of the pieces become installations that go out to meet the spectator and change the perception of the room, projected as they are to directly modify the space, delimit it, enlarge it, interpose themselves between the public and the structure of the gallery itself.
The piece Ex-voto fills a special place in the exhibition. It transmits us a sensation of spirituality or transcendent that we can extend to the rest of the pieces. This could be in relation with the manifest substitution between the religious ritual and the artistic one in contemporary times. Ex-voto is inspired by the work of the same title that Yves Klein, an artist of the ethereal and the immaterial, made in 1961 as a votive offering to Saint Rita in the sanctuary of Cascia (Perugia, Italy), where the incorrupt body of the saint is venerated.
From the lightness and airiness of her pieces, Amaia Bregel invites us to dream of ideal and metaphorical places, bathed in a gentle light of sweet colours.
ORDEN Y MORADA
26th October – 9th December, 2023
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday,
10:30AM – 1:30PM
6 – 9PM