MIGUEL ANGEL MOLINA

The exhibition brings together a selection of 26 exquisite pieces where the artist uses acrylic on wood generating a sense of relief where in turn plays with the overlapping of textures, colours and especially with the edges. The protagonists of the series.

For more than twenty years MAM has been working on the development of the possibility of the existence of painting outside the limits of the work. Being a painter and not painting pictures seemed, at the end of the century, to be an encouraging challenge. Today, the artist considers these displacements as attempts to leave one space to enter another... the same but different.

“Back with the paintings, those rectangles that hang on the wall as Donald Judd used to say, the question of the limit, of the edges or border allowed me to get out of a certain binarism or structural dualism. If in cinema or photography the frame produces an effect of champ and hors-champ, in painting the edge of the canvas can constitute a territory shared at the same time inside and outside the artwork.

To work on the margin, on its thickness, on its perimeter, is to understand the painting as an object, through which a well-known historical and symbolic regime is understood. The painting is the materialisation of the devices of vision that remain in force through the screens. It is curious in fact that the term “picture” has no equivalent in English. “Picture” refers to what is painted on the surface and what we might call an image, while “painting” designates the act of painting and by extension the product of that activity. Nothing really that speaks of the physical support.

To think of the edge of the painting as a possible territory means for me to open up an existential space, that is to say a space of hermeneutics as a horizon open to interpretation and the creation of meanings.So yes... I am a painter of paintings and not of pictures.

Rosny sous Bois, July 2022”.

Demonstrating a strong link with the territory, the support and their contained materials, Miguel Angel Molina’s work explores how to go beyond the image itself in order to find new interpretations in what is often an abandoned territory.