AGR

ABSTRACT Artwork Black and white Untitled by Spanish Artist Alicia Gimeno

2023

Born into a family of engineers where the technical understanding of space was the norm, Gimeno kept her taste for abstraction and added a dose of play and creative freedom. His works —both visual and sculptural— explore the expressive possibilities of form and line in relation to their context. ​The author starts from an aesthetic utopia: that of stripping forms, emptying them of everything that is not themselves. For her, this conceptual framework does not mean setting limits, quite the opposite. The horizon of an infinite search, which Gimeno assumes as improbable, encourages him to centralize the process. His research, then, seeks to see the lines and forms themselves speak, insisting on certain spatial configurations. For this reason, his chromatic range is mainly focused on the polarities of black and white, which allow him more clarity in his own formal language. The canvases become surfaces on which to write texts, almost like in a calligraphic operation. ​Now, the artist knows that the form never gets rid of its context, since it always arises from a material framework. Hence, her work makes the contingent evident, giving prominence to the canvas as a material, to textiles and their own characteristics. The word “context” explains itself: from the Latin contextus, it means “union of two or more elements, also the circumstances in which they are found”. And for the artist, it is this tangle of elements that is interwoven like roots that allows the formal implosion. His work not only invites the form to speak, whose language would be forced and reduced, but also to awaken the heartbeat that lives in its most organic part. Then your quest takes on depth as you double the power in this game with the limits of material. ​Art is an autonomous language, although its material is found in life, in movement and in its particular configurations. The form does not have to be an annulled detachment from life, an isolated part of it. Gimeno believes that good art is one where the form does not constrain the flow of life, the movement of the material. And this is evidenced in his works, where the context and the text touch each other and open up a zone of dialogue in a more organic synthesis.