Following the exhibition at our Madrid gallery in 2024 (A ras de suelo > < Estructuras anómalas), Rufo Criado, one of our most experienced and established artists, brings his latest exhibition project to Santander under the title INTERIOR (luz oblicua). Although the first works in this project date from 2021 and 2022, it was not until 2024 that he began to develop this concept of ‘interiors’ in a comprehensive and determined manner, bringing together in these nearly thirty works painting, photography and a large light box.
“The body of work I am exhibiting has a certain connection with the idea of an interior; they are simple structures: shapes, lines and colours that define spaces conceived as a vehicle for introspection and silence. A black silence resulting from the dark times that invade us daily in a noisy and grotesque manner.”
With these words, the artist captures the spirit that lies at the heart of these works, which continue in the aesthetic of geometric abstraction that has become his mark of identity. Since the early 1990s, his artistic process has begun by digitally planning the composition and colours on the computer, working on the different layers and the chromatic and luminous relationships, which he then meticulously transfers to the canvas using acrylic paint. When it comes to light boxes, the artistic object becomes sculptural, creating an atmosphere of light and colour that envelops the viewer. With a synesthetic sensibility, silence also seems to take centre stage in this experience, which creates an intimate space highly conducive to reflection. Specifically, the light box shown here, Luz interior, combines two distinct registers whose conjunction proves highly narrative despite the abstraction. The background is a lyrical and organic abstraction and superimposed upon it is an ovoid cut-out where geometric patterns intersect orthogonally, generating a highly evocative and inspiring formal tension between the two planes.
The canvases in the exhibition feature multiple geometric structures that play with colours and shapes, evoking the spaces to which the artist refers in the quotation above. These spaces may allude both to physical or architectural frameworks and to idealised representations of the inner self or the soul, in line with one of the RAE’s definitions of ‘interior’: ‘the soul as the principle of truly human activity’. The fact is that abstract painting always leaves us the possibility of experimenting through the richness of idealisation and open interpretation, delving into the infinite suggestions of colours, forms and structures.
We find in the photographs an interesting counterpoint to be related to the rest of his output. Rufo Criado has always been very keen on photography, even participating in PhotoEspaña in 2011 with the Evelyn Botella gallery and appearing in Exit magazine no. 61, a monographic issue dedicated to a series of painter-photographers, with text by Rosa Olivares. These snapshots, with a certain futuristic air in some cases, also lead us to the concept of the interior, each one—though very different from the others—containing a certain aura of mystery.
From all these interiors and all those the viewer weaves together, inspired by them, emerge the multiple oblique perspectives inherent in the creative universe that Rufo Criado gradually builds up over time.
INTERIOR (luz oblicua)
RUFO CRIADO
12 March – 2 May 2026
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:30AM – 1:30PM / 6 – 9PM