Asir

Mercedes Mangrané is one of the most relevant painters working today in Spain. Born in Barcelona in 1988, her work is well known for her small formats, her very personal treatment of matter and her chromatic palette, one that in spite of its apparent warmth, tends to find itself under a rare and cold luminosity. 

Mercedes Mangrané’s paintings are abstract. We may feel certain about this. However, a closer look reveals an interest in achitecture and space that runs throughout her entire output, and this places her in an ambiguous situation in relation to abstraction and representation. 

The exhibition in Room 9 is not a site-specific project, for these works were painted in the last few years, but it has been conceived in relation to this space, one of our best spaces for painting. The soft tonalities create a dialogue with the architecture and the frescoes that remain visible beyond the white walls. An emotional connection sparks, as the color in her work puts forth an affective flair to it all. 

Many of her concerns are to do with every painter’s concerns. How to make an image visible on a picture plane. Mangrané oscillates between the poles of opacity and transparency. She tests the durability and memory of images. A recent group of works, was entitled, significantly, Figures in the mist, She asks us to rreflect upon the surfaces upon which painting exists, its textures, its roughness, its neatness. Cristales, Sutura... There is something of a ruptura and a recomposition in her work, of bodies that shatter justo ut of breathing, of being…