Description of project by Rafa Macarrón
Rafa Macarrón is the first Spanish artist to exhibit at the La Nave Salinas Foundation in Ibiza. Before Rafa Macarrón (Madrid, 1981), there were Kaws, Keith Haring, Marco Brambilla, Bill Viola and Kenny Scharf. Without a doubt, a dream-team of current art with masters of Street Art, video or Pop Surrealism.
The Madrilenian enters this Olympus as the young Spanish talent who is making a place for himself on the international art scene. His work, in fact, is already in important collections and has been exhibited in Porto, New York, Miami, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Toronto, Istanbul and Bogotá. His last exhibition has been an individual one at the CAC museum in Malaga and now, during the summer of 2021, he presents El bañista / The Bather at the foundation of the island of Pitiusa. The canvases of him with his characteristic shape-shifting characters, full of humility, turn away from solitude to create legions of followers fascinated by them.
The exhibition, which can be visited from July 10 to October, brings together more than 15 paintings of various formats that have all been made in 2021. In them we find the different worlds that the painter has been creating. There are the black paintings of giant vertical formats and the panoramic landscapes. It is in these horizontal formats where thousands of scenes happen simultaneously. There are overcrowded beaches, but also lonely figures. There is color, a lot, but in three works black and white reign accompanied by shades of gray. In all of them a universe of their own, a magical realism, which the fan, the collector or the critic already recognize as the "Macarrón universe".
As Juan Manuel Bonet, former director of the Reina Sofía National Museum and the IVAM, points out, it was the critic Rubén Suárez who defined his work very well: “The type of trend it cultivates is not lacking in tradition, this fantastic and ornamental figuration with derivations of abstraction , surrealism and expressionism, that without going back much in history, and with the nuances that you want, you can have familiarity with some of the Cobra group such as Alechinsky, the first Dubuffet or our Bonifacio and Alfonso Fraile, passing through Miró or Arshile Gorky, to who André Breton invented the hybrid characters ”, wrote Suárez. Bonet himself points out, “From the beginning, Rafa Macarrón is clear that he wants to speak, with humor more white than black, more compassionate than cruel, about the street, about daily life, about his own existence, about his amazement at the world. . He chooses a range of colors in principle strident (later darker areas would come), a style inspired by painters like the ones we have been mentioning -Picasso, Picabia, Duchamp, Dubuffet, ... or Arroyo and Gordillo-, as well as in the comic language. The interiors, the landscapes and the beaches, the cosmic paintings, the bestiary, the human faces ... ”.
Macarrón himself defines his work in this way, “it is expressionism because it is born from a gesture, but also a new figuration. To make those elongated figures, knowing anatomy has helped me a lot. I know perfectly the structure of the body. I started to test with the deformations and saw that they worked very well. It's a bit like creating your own characters, each with their own soul ”.
Critics, always ready to create genealogical trees, find in Macarrón's work bits and pieces of Basquiat, Dubuffet or Picasso. From the Malaga maestro, we find a good dose of humor. When the references go to the more local side, we also talk about Millares, Fraile, - and we could end up with Goya and his Half-sunken Dog.
“Rafa's work excited me from the beginning. The images of him seemed to me born between the universe of constellations of Joan Miró and the optimistic landscapes of Manuel H. Mompó. I learned that Rafa was heir to an important tradition of Spanish painting that I personally admire, and I have the firm intuition that he will do a lot of justice to his artistic success, ”explains Lio Malca, promoter of the La Nave Salinas Foundation and one of the first and Keith Haring and Basquiat's most important collectors. Today, in fact, he is one of the largest providers of his work for exhibitions. Malca adds, “I very quickly imagined Rafa's work among the pines and the Mediterranean Sea that surround La Nave Salinas, being an organic and integral part of the Ibiza landscape and, somehow, celebrating the paintings also with his presence, the departure from the sun, the life of its beaches and people and the warm sunsets that we have in summer in the natural park that surrounds the space. I am convinced that Rafa and La Nave Salinas de Ibiza are going to get along really well ”.
Pedaling towards the summit
“Everything is based on the anatomy of the human person, just like the Greeks and Romans. And if we put together the sea, the sky and the sand of the beach, it is one of the places where the human figure stands out ”, Macarrón points out about El bañista / The Bather. And he adds, “these canvases are about rebirth, speak of a new hope of life and, nothing better for it, than trying to reflect it in the summer, on the beaches of Ibiza, with the light and blue of the Mediterranean. It is the day-to-day portrait of a happy person ... For that reason my characters if they look at each other, they never get upset and, even to avoid it, they don't even look at each other ”.
Rafa Macarrón is the representative of the new generation of an important saga in the history of galleries, art and Spanish architecture.
He started painting in 2006, at the age of 25. Self-taught, it was the painter Juan Barjola who encouraged him not to enter the Academy of Fine Arts. But always, since childhood, he had a pencil in his hands. “Coinciding with the inauguration of the Picasso Museum in Paris, upon entering one of the rooms he asked for a notebook and colored pencils, he lay on the floor for a whole morning trying to understand what was in front of him. Obviously that love for Picasso still flows through his veins. He was four years old. At seven, Rafa made colorful drawings of animals or people born in some unknown world, but living in our land or circling around it and is still stuck in that arid world of his ”, tells us his father, the architect Rafael Macarrón.
After leaving high school, he started as a professional cyclist. The same individual, solitary effort with which he pedales to reach the top of the Tourmalet puts him in his paintings. "On the bike, I entered the same state of flow that I achieve by painting, that you spend eight, ten hours, without stopping and you do not realize the passage of time," says the painter. His discipline - he sticks to the strict schedule - as a painter comes from there. You are not afraid of large canvases measuring 3.80 x 2.90 m or 1.40 x 4.09 m. Some, from a distance, may seem pure expressionism but, when approaching, there are hundreds of drawings of their characters that plague the scene in the manner of a contemporary Bosco or Brueghel.
In 2010 he won the prestigious BMW Prize for painting and in 2013 he was chosen as the most interesting artist at the Madrid art fair ARCO.
Macarrón's work always begins on A4 sheets or on sheets. He is a tireless draftsman. The scribble sometimes becomes a canvas but it is never the same. It's fast. It takes no more than a week to finish a painting. If not, they lose freshness. "The work has to be spontaneous even though it is worked," he confesses. For this he uses colors that do not complement each other and a wide range of materials. “The pencils, the markers and the painter's hand provide the plot. Waxes, like acrylics and gouaches, provide nuanced transparencies and oil is the most complex, it is the "gentleman" who knows how to give the weight of the painting with small dots, but its filling and texture make it the boss. , there is not the slightest doubt. The spray gives modernity, dynamism, color ”. And of course there are the books. At the entrance to his studio we find catalogs by Mark Rothko, Gorky, de Kooning, Oehlen, Dubuffet, Miró, Guerrero or Barjola. They are, almost, a declaration of intentions. We also find works or biographies of Le Corbusier. His canvases are assembled from the mythical system of measurements –Modulor– by the French architect.
An appointment with Art (in capital letters)
La Nave Salinas Foundation dedicates an annual exhibition, since 2015, to great contemporary masters with the aim of connecting Ibiza with the international art circuit and turning the island, every summer, into an appointment with current creation.
Promoted by the Colombian collector - New Yorker by adoption - Lio Malca, the 2021 edition has found the complicity of another collector based in Los Angeles, Alberto Chehebar. La Nave Salinas is a 700 square meter stone building located by the sea, built in 1941 to store the salt harvested in the ponds integrated in the Ses Salines Natural Park. Disused for decades, it was rescued by Malca for this non-profit foundation. So far Kaws (2015), Marco Brambilla (2016), Keith Haring (2017), Bill Viola (2018) and Kenny Scharf (2019) have exhibited.
