by Miguel Rasero

From October 2 to 26. Opening, October 2 at 8:00 p.m.

Miguel Rasero was born in Doña Mencía (Córdoba). He currently shares his residence between Sant Joan Despí and Arnes (Terra Alta).
The purpose of painting is not to make things clear, but to delve into their mystery. Painting still lifes is not about capturing or recording a composition of objects on a table, but about intensifying and making more mysterious the absolute strangeness of the light as it catches them.

The purpose of painting the domestic and familiar is to engage with the very concept of familiarity. Thus, the energy of a painting comes not from the creation of an image, but from its failure, from the defamiliarization of colors, textures, and shadows. From this fragmentation, from what was solid, a new way of seeing things emerges.

In the case of Miguel Rasero’s still lifes, the defamiliarization is twofold. The artist is not only creating a fresh image from a domestic scene; he is also often alluding, both subtly and directly, to previous representations of these scenes.

His goal is, in principle, to be irreverent and ironic. But, when he gets to work creating shapes and textures, something else takes control. The artist allows the work of previous painters to inhabit his painting as shadows or subterranean flows, but it is his own vision of texture, color, detail, or composition that begins to dominate. In this way, a game, or a battle, is triggered between the knowledge we have of other painters who approached this genre, whether working from extreme realism, analytical cubism or even collage, and what we perceive now, the singular vision of a singular painter who leaves his visual mark on still life.

In Miguel Rasero’s work it is fascinating to study the attention between the unique, beautiful, captivating and harmonious image, and the more complex and arduously worked set of opposing textures and tones that compose it.

Rasero loves irregular textures and suggestive shadows.

In the shadows, ready to pounce, are Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris. Sometimes Rasero avoids them, at other times he embraces their imagination, as if their emblematic works were also objects on a table to play with, or parody and appropriate in painting.
Text for the catalog of the “Still Life” exhibition in Córdoba, by Colm Tóibín.