PINTURAS

Charo Pradas (Hoz de la Vieja, Teruel, 1960) belongs to a generation of painters, increasingly influential on the international stage, who are firmly committed to restoring abstraction’s power of meaning. Fortunately, we are now far removed from the tyranny of formalism that seemed to bring painting to an end in the 1960s, reducing it to the condition of a mere metalinguistic exercise. And far from dogmatic and academic positions, artists such as Charo Pradas not only restore our faith in the possibilities of painting, but do so in a brilliant and spectacular way.

Pradas began her career painting ambiguous organic forms. Over time, these have been simplified into spirals, springs and pulsating spaces, reflecting the pictorial gestures that brought them into being. But beyond the evident delight with which optical or ornamental effects are emphasised, these strangely coloured paintings become a meditation on the nature of art as both a physical and mental activity. And rather than ordered arrangements of forms and colours on a flat surface, they testify to an attempt to capture the unstoppable mutation of everything visible.

The work of Charo Pradas demands the active participation of the viewer, who already lives in a world in which cybernetics and computers are commonplace. Her futuristic spaces might seem like objectified illustrations of certain scientific assumptions, also embracing the lessons of modernity in its more methodical strands. But perhaps the greatest poetic strength of her work lies in combining such advanced concerns with an artistic technique as primitive as painting, demonstrating in any case its effectiveness in speaking about the issues that concern us today, as well as those that will always concern us.