Research Catalogue

website: macarenarioseco.com

I lead my work as a practice-based research approach to art-making. My work proposes a non representational and en-active approach to Abstraction in painting. In my view Abstraction is an experience in which a painter dynamically engages with pictorial materials through a performative process, almost in the form of a dialogue. Instead of the noun ‘Abstract’ —which refers to an object— I use the verb ‘Abstracting’, which is an action and a method that engages with painting as an overt action. Abstracting in painting then, is a subjectified and a dynamic phenomenon that  concretely appears in the world embodied by marks of paint left on a surface

My work proposes a Gestural Minimalism, as performative pictorial model, which is a practice that is structured based on the repetition of a singular pictorial gesture. For the compositions I divide the pictorial plane in a grid and then I place one single brushstroke inside each squared spaces of that grid. The textures imprinted on the paint provide overt evidences of the only tool I use —a brush— and the single movement —a gesture— that I repeatedly perform during practice. The accumulation of strokes on the plane and along the grid composes fragmented surfaces with multiple variations of a single coloured brushstroke. The tones used are mixtures between two colours and fractals is the model that informs the order of the tones, hence the colour relations are repeated at different scales of magnification within each painting. All these elements together compose overall chromatic gradual degradations waving between two colours.