MARU QUINONERO, MARIA YELLETISCH

The artists, in an individual and personal exercise, but also shared and collaborative, have managed to find their own common places to develop an exhibition project that revolves around the color pink, a priori, the only element they thought they shared.

The QY2023 project is divided into 3 sections or phases of work that the artists have shared for more than a year. The first, the most conceptual, was born during a visit to Arco 2022 in which they decided to study this color from different angles. This is how they managed to investigate its different meanings, shades and socio-cultural connotations. And beyond staying in the superficiality of a color equally rejected and praised by the great gender charge it contains, Maru and Maria, look back to their memories and their emotional depths to define their own palette in pink. The second phase takes place during a trip to Marrakech, where they both travel and seek inspiration through the sensory experience offered by the city and its Medina in shades of pink. There, a stage of the project is developed based on dialogue, the sharing of ideas, they talk for the first time about materials, the first sketches appear and they explore together the pigments and the most rudimentary tools of Moroccan craftsmanship. In the third and final stage, Quiñonero and Yelletisch work together in their studios in Carabanchel and Malasaña to produce and give shape to all the ideas they have been working on for months. It is when they decide that the project makes more sense and remains more faithful to the whole shared experience, if they both intervene together in the works.

Thus we arrive at this exhibition, in which the paper, the shapes and the dry pigments typical of Maru’s pencils, and the canvases, the repetition and the oils full of texture characteristic of María, come together to present a new minimalism full of color. The delicacy of the strokes of one together with the cordiality of the brushstrokes of the other, give birth to a series of works full of matter, kindness, trust and respect, ways in which the artists have been able to work together. The abstraction that each one of them works individually in such a serene way, now reaches a new pictorial category in which the mixed technique and the double authorship, far from scribbling or blurring their compositions, obtains a new meaning full of symbolism and visual richness.

Courtesy Alzueta Gallery