Press Release
Miki Leal
Balada heavy (Heavy ballad)
From January 21st until April 10th 2015
Opening Wednesday January 21st 2015
About Heavy ballad
I do not know if you have noticed that the best ballads of the world are
reputed to be made by groups of Heavy metal music. This is a belief from our
youth that has turned into an urban legend.
This exhibition has a similar structure to the musical structure of a heavy
ballad: A/A/B/A (Part A or introduction, part A or development of the first
part, Part B or refrain; final part A with identical structure to the introduction).
Parts of the exhibition:
A/ Kind of Blue (Miles Davis, 1959).
This work is the only work in this show that has been taken from a previous
production. It works for me as a warning to the viewer, a warning of the
improvisatory character of the rest of the exhibition.
A/ Series Zazou (French Movement of urban tribes emerged in the 40s,
during the occupation. They expressed their dissatisfaction with aggressive
dancing (swing) and an Anglo-Saxon style clothing. They loved jazz; in fact
the name of the group is taken from a music theme (zah zah zuh) by the
black musician Cab Calloway.)
Continuing with the musical theme, this pictorial series, structured as a
timeline, it highlights curiosities that characterized this Zazou movement,
especially with regards to jazz.
B/ Tríptico Bodegón -Paisaje-Retrato (Triptych Still Life-Landscape-Portrait)
These three works speak of painting from painting. I try to honor the three
classic pictorial genres, now somewhat forgotten.
Along the triptych I present some pieces of pottery which continue to be
related to the above. They also speak of forgotten craftsman’s traditions,
representing everyday objects of familiar imagery.
A/ Ritmo y lectura (Rhythm and Reading)
Again, true to the repetition of the musical structure of the heavy ballad,
the theme is again music, this time the silences; in this case addressing a
personal recurring theme: “What is it that happens in the paper margins.”
In fact my painting has evolved in recent times into an interest towards the
margins, opposed to the central motif. These silent spaces of the picture,
seemingly endless, allow me a curious look on perhaps anecdotal elements
but of great importance to me in their usefulness for graphical representation
of the passing of time (brightness, wrinkles, scratches ...).
Miki Leal
About Miki Leal
Miki Leal, (Seville 1974), graduate in Fine Arts from the University of Seville,
received in 2009 the Caja Sol Grant. He has had solo shows in galleries in
Spain, Italy and Germany, taking part in Seville’s 2nd Biacs (2006), and group
shows in institutions such as CA2M (Madrid, Spain), Artium (Vitoria, Spain),
Musac (León, Spain) and Hangar 7 (Viena, Austria). In 2013 he had a solo
show at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Andaluz, in Sevilla (Spain)
Miki Leal uses paper as his only medium, with acrylics and watercolours as
main techniques, together with pastels colours and pencil. It is also important
the way the artist takes advantage of paper properties, scratching the paper
surface and breaking it as another artistic resource.
Usually, Miki Leal takes images for his paintings from jazz, cinema and pop
images. This material serves the painter as going from the figurative to the
abstract, from images to painting. His work develops different strategies
that cover the image from painting, and which may go from the direct use of
a photographic, cinematographic or media referent, to the re-elaboration of
images taken from everyday experience.
Both when he deals with the direct choice of determined and concrete
photographic material (preexisting images or ones taken directly by the artist)
as a source or starting point for the proposal, and when we are only faced
with the mark or the spectra of the photographic element, these works have a
relationship with a complex process of transposing the image.
The center of attention thus shifts from the concrete image and the reality
that it might show towards the meditated relationship with the image that
is established in the operation of re-elaborating the photographic through
painting.
The third important clue of his works is color; the intensity of brushstroke and
brilliance of a tireless imagination: “Color is precisely the true and principal
protagonist acting as a climate which contains all of the other elements: a
sort of catalyst whose presence gives all the other elements meaning in the
composition. All the evocative power of painting is created by the color”.
For more information or hi-res images, please contact the Gallery:
[email protected] Ph. +34 963 51 01 79