Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Ramona, an exhibition of new canvas and paper paintings by Spanish artist Mònica Subidé. The exhibition will be on view at Nino Mier Gallery, Marfa through November 19, 2022.
Mònica Subidé’s paintings are portraits and still lives set against shallow, color-blocked backdrops. The surfaces of each work are highly textural, either revealing the artist’s hand at work or incorporating collaged motifs beneath the paint. Subidé works with a formal language that refines scenes into their elemental parts, melding the figural with the geometric and the abstract in a quasi-cubist approach to figuration. The distinction between figure and ground is articulated through line, not through depth, in this inscrutable, psychological space.
The subjects of Ramona are enigmatic and obscure, their faces blank slates rather than revealing an interiority. The affective charge of her works are instead cultivated through the rich, deep color schemes and lush handling of paint. Displayed in varying relaxed postures in the bold, colorful any-space, the figures take on a timeless, mythic quality for their totemic stature and lack of overt sentiment.
Waiting in the blue room, 2022, for instance, depicts two women sitting or lying down on a desert pink plane, looking blankly into the unpictured distance. The wall behind them is bifurcated in two—a grey side and a blue side—and a green vase with flowers fantastically floats atop the reposed figure. The title’s invocation of “waiting”, the distant gazes, and the unnaturalistic representation of objects in space contribute to an atmosphere of beguiling mystery that pervades the exhibition.
Subidé writes that “Ramona is a landscape, the landscape of the face” — as though the face were an object with a material history and possessing natural force. Recalling how the show began, with the eponymous Ramona, 2022 oil on linen painting, she continues:
“I remember the day I thought the painting was finished, but I can never be sure until a few days have passed. I set the painting aside, facing the wall, and begged for it to be finished. When I turned it over, I not only saw that it was finished, but also saw my grandmother within it. Her name is Ramona. I thought that it was a painting that would take care of all the others once it was exposed, as she took care of me.”