Spanish Interlude

This year’s monsoon exhibition at Galerie Isa is entitled ‘Spanish Interlude’. It is devised in collaboration with Gallery Pelaires in Mallorca, the earliest commercial gallery to be established in Spain. Gallery Pelaires was founded in 1969 by Pep Pinya. In 1970 it was the first gallery in Spain to exhibit the legendary artist, Joan Miro. ‘Spanish Interlude’ brings together three of Gallery Pelaires’ artists for a group show at Galerie ISA, Mumbai: Guillermo Rubi, Amparo Sard and Nicholas Woods.

Besides living and working in the beautiful Mediterranean island of Mallorca, what the three artists share in common is challenging the medium of painting. Rubi’s distorted characters and overlapping contours of layers of paint on metal and canvas, plunge us into a dreamscape, somewhere between tangible and intangible beauty. Sard’s painstaking perforations on paper and glass result in the formation of unique art works and sculptures. Using pure pigment powders directly on paper, Woods explores optical phenomena related to colour fields and their possible relationships with the perception of our celestial-solar surroundings.

Guillermo Rubí (b.1971 Mallorca,Spain) plays with concepts that are both immaterial and abstract in order to construct complex mind maps which give structure to all of his projects. This fractal network, composed of infinite nodules, branches of research, overlaps and gaps, comprises the architecture upon which the artist creates his work. He takes his own experience as a starting point, while trying to get the viewer involved in simultaneous searches provoked by each piece.

Rubi’s paintings are an elaborate geometrical web of similar colours. He mixes acrylic and enamel on surfaces like canvas or aluminium and distorts preexisting images to make the viewer look twice.

Amparo Sard was born in Mallorca in 1973. She lives and works between Mallorca & Barcelona. Sard has a Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, where she is currently a Professor. Sard goes back to piercing the ‘immaculate’ surfaces of her works, taking the principle of pleasure, in the Freudian style, to a more sombre level of compulsion-repetition. In Sard’s works there is a search for a certain sensitivity; that is, for bodily passion and earth’s intensity when everything is being driven toward a hypnotic ‘virtualisation’. The society of digital obscenity fails to remember the world’s fertile substratum but the earth remembers.

Sard has exhibited world over and has had several institutional shows throughout her career. Her works have found homes in several important notable collections, such as MoMa, New York; The Guggenheim, New York; Deutsche Bank Berlin and Deutsche Bank New York, among many other institutional and private collections.

Nicholas Woods was born in in 1971 in Virginia and has his BA from the Middlebury college in Vermont. He has been living and working in Mallorca since 2009. Landscape is without a doubt the central protagonist of Woods’ work. This device has allowed him to explore it from multiple angles, opening innumerable semiotic veins while mining the relationships that are established between the signifier as image, and intention; a territory that is much closer to thought and memory, and consequently much more psychological. Both keys are hidden in the successive lines of work that Woods’ has been investigating, somewhat in the manner of Richter, like a systematic botanist classifying interests, reasons, doubts and intentions, some mental and others strictly technical and material.

By applying dry pigment powder to the paper through an abrasive process, Woods highlights the particular surface qualities within the image. The delicate, velvet-like surface of these drawings has an almost numinous or hallucinatory quality and it is the combination of such distinctive imagery with a unique handling of the materials that gives them such a strong presence.

His paintings have been exhibited in Europe and the United States, including (among others): the CAC Málaga; Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Mallorca; Vacío 9, Madrid; The Royal Standard, Liverpool; and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. Woods is represented in important public collections, particularly in Spain, including: CAC Málaga; Fundación La Caixa; Colección Caja Madrid; Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art; and Fundación Pilar i Joan Miró, Mallorca.