Blog Archives

Carlos Cartaxo

Valladolid, 1978

Presented by SHIRAS GALERÍA

Carlos Cartaxo paints, draws and creates three dimensional Wood relief carvings wich he then puts on the Wall, thus exacerbating the substantial nature of painting. These small format works depict objects as shields. But when the format of his work is larger, they acquire great complexity, thus suggesting architectural models with landscapes and views from above. These wood relief carvings are painted with acrylic paint and then varnished, wich gives them a futuristic and handmade finish. Cartaxo also creates small and complex paintings, similar to the german´s artist Thomas Scheibitz, Although Cartaxo gives to his paintings a warmer atmosphere with duller colors. All his images seem to emerge from the experience of contemporary architecture and design, and from like in the city, in interiors filed with cables an pipes. His painting is self-referential and metalinguistic, wich works as a perfect machine and supposes an apotheosis of the world of art in an exciting quest for new images and vocabularies. Finally, his collages on graph paper, from the series entitled Territorios, remind us of diagrams and architectural plans. Trough them, he snows us very complex structures, and just like the cubist images, they seem to simultaneously introduce different points of view, combining aspects both of plans and elevations. Its autonomous nature isemphasized, atlast, by this ambiguity.

Adrián Martínez

Project WALL DRAWING

Teresa Matas

Project “Islas del dibujo: trazos comunes”

Teresa Matas has lived in Mallorca since childhood. She started her artistic career in the 1980s and has exhibited continuously ever since. The major retrospective exhibition Why do I dress in black if I love life so much? which was held in 2017 at the Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo Es Baluard of Palma refers to her creations from 1985 to 2016. This exhibition coincided with her entering the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Sebastián de Palma as the first woman to be thus distinguished.
Gradually penetrating the world of drawing and painting, the work of Teresa Matas assimilated objects with which she began to create installations that reflect her investigation into identity, with the intention of revealing what is kept hidden, the impulses of her nature.
Her plastic expression unfolds in mediums as different as textile installations, painting, photomontage, performances, video, text, and drawing. Her coherent and powerful language unites all these technical mediums in an enveloping and disturbing poetic expression, which drags us from our lethargy and obliges us to explore the sense of time and life.

Ricard Chiang

Project “Islas del dibujo: trazos comunes”

His career over several decades includes participation in various collective exhibitions and international art fairs such as Arco, Art Fair Cologne (Germany) and Art Lisboa. He was awarded second prize of the VIII Fundación Barceló International Painting Competition (Palma, 1998) and first prize of the Autumn Exhibition of Plasencia of the Caja de Extremadura (2005); his work is represented in both public and private collections.
He lives and works in Mallorca. With work that unites two pictorial traditions of different origin (European and Chinese), Ricard Chiang builds bridges between what is real and what is imaginary.
His work shows the omnipresence of drawing and how the world is structured by lines and compositions in which light and shade blend to guide us. Working on paper with Indian ink, creating drawings with shadows projected on a surface permeable to light or taking his “tracing” instruments from nature (trunks, flowers, roots, cobwebs), the artist operates a process of revealing what is real, the simplicity of means of which that is so clear in the work chosen for Drawing Room is inversely proportional to his capacity for communication and emotion.

Nuria Román

Project “Islas del dibujo: trazos comunes”

After several years abroad (the Netherlands in 1984 and the United States 1994-97) and Spanish and international exhibitions, she settled in Menorca where she now lives and works. Her work unfolds in plastic areas as different as painting, ceramics, sculpture in stone and steel, installation, and performance.
Since her arrival in the Balearics, from a thematic point of view she has concentrated on gender matters linked to a strong environmental concern. Her approach however rejects a demagogic perspective in favour of an affective one, in which elements connected with women (needles, for example) are transformed into sculptural exhibits or drawings, which are used symbolically as instruments of reception and confinement (in their intimate expression) or of the re-establishing of bridges. Recovering what is injured, recalling the relationship between the earth and the human body (that of women in this case), as can be seen in these two exhibits of Drawing Room the work of Nuria Román establishes drawing as an instrument of communication. This intimate and essential dialogue reveals a profound post-humanist awareness that keeps a close watch on the environment.

Mari Jo Ribas

Project “Islas del dibujo: trazos comunes”

A graduate in Fine Arts from the Universidad de Barcelona in 2006, in the same year she went on an Erasmus programme to the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach in Frankfurt. She obtained a PhD in Design, Art, and Society from the Escuela Universitaria de Diseño e Ingeniería (ELISAVA), Barcelona (2008) and a Master’s degree in Artistic Productions and Investigation at the Universidad de Barcelona (2010). She has exhibited since 2003 in Palma, Madrid, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Berlin, Helsinki, and New York. Her work has been supported by grants and produced as part of art residence programmes, especially in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany; it investigates the relationship between art and science.
Through her work with photography, video, drawing, and installations she explores varied themes. The Golden Nanoparticle, which was developed during a residence programme in Edinburgh in a sculpture workshop, is the result of collaboration with a scientist.
Transporting to the visible scale what is normally only observed through optical instruments, this work reveals drawing in plastic terms as the soul of sculpture/installation.

Joan Cortés

Project “Islas del dibujo: trazos comunes”

After having studied at the School of Arts and Trades of Palma and at La Llotja in Barcelona, Joan Cortés, who lives and works in Mallorca, started his career as a sculptor in the 1980s. He began to exhibit individually in 1995 and has taken part in countless collective exhibitions and art fairs.
His work is characterised by its great sobriety and shows a clear interest in organic forms, the volumetry of which he explores in both drawing and sculpture. With the latter he investigates the possibilities of materials as different as stone, plaster, wood, steel, polyurethane, or rubber. The pictorial work that sometimes accompanies his sculpture sublimates the baring of shapes to make them silent and introspective.
In the works chosen we have wished to stress the strong relationship between drawing and sculpture and how his work reveals itself in the organicity of drawing even by using very simple means, and how this structural thought is maintained in the transition to sculpture.

Dolores Sampol

Project “Islas del dibujo: trazos comunes”

After studying Fine Art at the Facultad de Bellas Artes de Sant Jordi, Barcelona (1971-1975), for the next decade (1976-1986) Dolores Sampol was involved in the preservation and restoration of paintings. She has exhibited her work regularly since the mid-1980s, both individually and collectively, in Palma, Madrid, Barcelona, Girona, Bilbao, Pamplona, Seville, Valencia, Camagüey (Cuba), Washington D.C. (United States), Berlin, Moscow, and Athens. Likewise she has taken part in important international art fairs such as Art Chicago (1992 and 1998); Arco, Madrid (1998, 1999, and 2002); Estampa, Madrid (1995, 2002, and 2003); Artíssima, Turin, Italy (1999); Art Miami (2000); Art Karlsruhe, Germany, (2007); Art Beijing, Stand España, Peking, China (2015), and Drawing Room, Madrid (2018).
With the use of a rigorous technique, Dolores Sampol approaches drawing in an intimate manner with a mastery that also extends to painting and resorts to elements of nature. A keen observer of the natural world down to the most minute details of the landscape, the artist associates drawing of naturalist inspiration with its actual point of reference to create harmonious and poetic compositions.

Astrid Colomar

Project “Islas del dibujo: trazos comunes”

A graduate in History of Art (Universidad de Barcelona, 1993) and in Fine Arts (Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, Washington, D.C., 1996), she has been exhibiting individually since 1996 and collectively since 1995 both in Spain (Palma, Madrid, Barcelona) and internationally (Basle, Switzerland; Washington D.C., United States). Her work has won several awards and features in various public and private collections.
The work of Astrid Colomar uses drawing as a means of expression and aims to relate the force of life to symbolic aspects of the feminine and human condition by analysing both time and biological cycles. Fluid shapes, colours with a strong symbolic association, cuttings affixed to the medium by needles (elements of union), or as in the case of the composition of four drawings chosen for Drawing Room, a flow of ink that runs like blood or like a river. This work of strong gestural expression evokes the relationship between primitive elements and the human body, an intrinsic part of nature.

Andreu Maimó

Project “Islas del dibujo: trazos comunes”

A painter, sculptor, potter, and engraver, he began to exhibit on his own in 1976. Throughout his career he has taken part in countless collective exhibitions in Spain and Germany, among other countries. In recent years he has concentrated particularly on engraving, using different techniques and exploring lithography and xylography with special interest.
In his investigation of two of the engraving techniques that are without doubt closest to drawing, he continuously practises these art forms by means of thematic approaches with close links to nature. The realism of his drawing does not however exhaust his expressive skills. In the two lithographs and in the xylography shown in Drawing Room, the thread maintains a bewitching and labyrinthine fluidity whether it is drawn on stone or furrowed in the body of the wood.
The body of fig trees, which are naturally sculptural, is presented in these works as a call to the power of the enchantment of nature, leading us to see more with due care and emotion.