La Leona

Mateo Andrea

April 18 - May 18, 2024 Athens

Birds,
mixed media on canvas,
114 x 146 cm
2022

An incarnation somewhere between figure and dazzlement, Mateo Andrea delivers up his gaze. He then commits himself to an investigation of formal problems in unsettling propositions that lead him to the construction of new images, because his thing is the revelation of a strange intensity that, more than mere painting, poses questions on form, perception and memory, and also an enquiry into the capacity to see. What is the world, if not an arrangement of presences? Which, as in his tragicomic paintings, “La Coleccionista (2008) or “Le Tourmenté” (2009), appear to femme-fatalely besiege the artist. In the end, to paint is to present forms to the world, but it also refers to thinking oneself, a mysterious life accommodated in these murmuring scenes summarized in titles often with monosyllabic forthrightness, with something of a mysterious phonetic poem in the style of Cage, back and over between the use of Spanish and English.

Cheetah,
mixed media on paper,
60 x 80 cm
2023

Like a beforehand of the voice, but from the sobriety of someone who wishes to let the paintings speak for themselves in their descriptions of the world, as if they were talking about another world, as if Mateo Andrea was looking inwards, almost at times like in dreams, yet without exercising a sense of aloneness. Asking about the very act of seeing, about a mysterious spirit wandering in space as if in suspension, like spatial illusions, fantastic voyages, introspective atmospheres (though at times feeding off the complexity of the surrounding world), and also allegories, parables and epigrams, while at once addressing the narrative of a mysterious energy given off by the images. With a hypnotic air, many of his creations have to do with the construction, almost the apparition and presence, of images. Paintings that attest to how their creation is also an experience of thinking, without abandoning mystery and estrangement like a poetic alterity, his exploration ends up referring to melancholia and desire, and also to the very limits of perception.

El sueno de Zarafa,
mixed media on paper,
60 x 80 cm
2023

Mateo Andrea leaves interpretations open, he leaves room for other gazes to interpret them, while at once without any compunction he introduces a play of illusions like a demand for the driving energy of creation, joyfully cross-contaminated by those illusionist elements conceived from a numinous territory of restraint.