VALENCIA.- For the first time in a Spanish museum, this exhibition combines the latest works of two Portuguese young artists Mónica Capucho and Ana Sério whose aesthetic and conceptual options are, in its material concretion, clearly antonymous. They display the different ways the Portuguese contemporary art is going through.
Mónica Capucho elaborates paintworks reveling, in a very elaborated way, the heritage of the known geometric abstraction, in which its sense is emphasized by suitable short sentences superposed in diverse ink coats with high technical discipline and rigor.
On the other hand, Ana Sério makes an incursion in abstraction (nearly geometric and of gestures) and three-dimensional space, with a strong ludic component in which it is sought, as an art critic wrote somewhere, to make a personal appropriation (based above all on literary references) of the creative intervention space by means of the conciliation of different materials and technical proceedings. The exhibition catalogue reproduces the exhibited works of art and publishes texts of Luísa Soares de Oliveira, Salvato Telles de Menezes.
The dialogue among the paintworks of Mónica Capucho and Ana Sério, and also with each visitor, have to be understood as a manifestation of the capacity to encouraging meditation. Formally, there are a few things in common between the works of art and both artists. But the fact they belong to similar generations, their training in plastics in the same institution (although in different times) and also the genre, although both put aside the idea to emphasize the "feminine" in their correspondent work, approaches them.
In Ana Sério's work, the pictorial gestures are the element immediately imposed and it becomes more evident seeing as if the wastes of the painter's works were included in certain works: a strip of thin wood, ink-stained cardboard casts, crumpled paper. Her painting is traditionally two dimensional and the clippings, the paper rolls, etc. keep reminding the vertical plane. It is like the paraphernalia found in an artist's atelier. They allow us to think that they can be unrolled every time and reveal the painting or the drawing they lock in their inside folds. These are works that appeal the sculpture in the painting and, the other way round, the three-dimension of the space and the colour and light intricacy inherent to the painting. It is also frequent to find mirrors in this artist's work, on the floor or hung in unusual places for the visitors to take full awareness they are in a space where images spread.
Mónica Capucho's painting present dense surfaces, covered by an exemplary chromatic economy where phrases or words emerged by the painting itself are written in typographic characters. The chosen font type and the option for English language recall us, likewise, to the universe of popular culture. In the process of Mónica Capucho's work she uses the mesh as instrument and method. Each painting is done with a substantial number of ink coats which are successively hidden by means of masks. In removing those masks, the surface keeps signs of this hiding at the same time that reveals subtle contrasts between bright and dull, light and shade, colours and non-colours.
Her paintings have to be read from a front view and in depth because they construct a painting stratigrafy. Mónica Capucho's pieces establish, firstly, relationships with its fellow pieces and with the space itself, where they are exhibited. It can be asserted that they talk to each other and to the visitor. The painted word remains as a remote echo that once became more visible than the shape.
Finally, the works of Ana Sério and Mónica Capucho, different only apparently, correspond and complete to each other like a musical piece played in duet. On one side, the fold, the gesture, the unconscious visceral manner of the art that becomes the vital extension of the artist. On the other hand, the grid, the rationality, the geometry and the remote echoes of the painting that talk in silence to who materializes it. In both sides, a look for the common history of the contemporary art.