February 6 March 5
Sea Tecture is an exhibition of recent work by the Galician artist Urbano Lugrís Vadillo. It forms part of the series of individual exhibitions devoted to international surrealist artists, which the Granell Foundation has been organising since its creation.
The artist began his plastic career in the eighties, joining the European avant-garde movements from the fifties, which, based on the concept of abstraction, are encompassed by the general name of informalism. His mature work now gives rise to surrealism as a necessary, liberating catharsis.
Vadillo, in whom surrealism was always latent, in the boy of overwhelming imagination and the tireless reader of fantasy literature, and in the attentive spectator of his fathers stories, discovers the sea, always present in his life, in his liquid and plastic corpus, both the setting and basis of his compositions, as the texture for realizing his fantastic childhood dreams: his adult surrealist dreams.
The sea is understood in a general sense as a free space, without limits, a stable, undetermined space; for the author, the sea is therefore both the ocean and the sea of the Castilian plateau, a region with which he has strong links, and functions as the leitmotiv containing the forms and frayed experiences of the subconscious.
At a compositional level, the clearly oneiric space in the artists recent work is sometimes materialised by the monumentality of the figures and other times by means of the liquid or gaseous masses that correspond to a climatology of interior landascape; on other occasions, by virtue of different types of spatial treatments of an architectural nature, which are displayed in his pictorial praxis. His interest in architecture is a constant feature of all his plastic production.
The exhibition, occupying the Granell Foundation buildings entire first floor, features a total of large-, medium- and small-format works, with which the spectator can establish another of the essential mechanisms present in the artists recent work: play on scale.
