Pittore is the title of this exhibition at the MARCO in Vigo which displays, for the first time at a Spanish museum, a comprehensive panorama of recent work by the artist Lluís Lleó (Barcelona, 1961), produced since his return from the United States in 2017. This labour, undertaken at a distance after coming back to his homeland, provides a retrospective and introspective view of his experience of living in America for almost thirty years.
With this inscription, borrowed from a painting by Philip Guston, Lleó pays homage to some of the artists who have inspired him –Eva Hesse, Jannis Kounellis, Ellsworth Kelly: Hesse (2021-22 and 2023), Jannis en Lalibela (2023), Durrell@Co., El viaje imposible, Todo lo que viste es tuyo (2022)– and to painting itself, which is arranged throughout the exhibition in the most varied techniques and media, including the disciplines of sculpture and installation. However, Pittore is, most importantly, a painter’s declaration made by an artist –with an architect’s vocation– –Yo quería ser arquitecto [I wanted to be an architect](2023)–, whose work goes beyond the edges of the canvas and the wall –Nosotras (2020-22), Guetaria 1895 (2022-23)– opens multiple “windows” from within a painting –Gould (2019), Acuérdate de mirar (2022), Paisaje líquido I and II (2022)– and builds spaces where one can live inside a painting –Aquí vive un pintor [A painter lives here](2022).
The heart of the exhibition is the panopticon where Lleó has installed The Perfect Year, a circular steel structure clad in al fresco decorated terracotta, a piece he began in 2008 after the death of his father who was also a painter.
The Perfect Year is a painter’s private diary of sorts: this work in progress consists of 365 blocks in which Lleó has jotted down landscapes, dates, appearances and, especially, disappearances. A space-time circle which serves to round off, in a way, the journey of an entire lifetime.
Lleó’s universe expands outwards from this central point, through MARCO’s galleries and courtyards, through the paintings on linen or paper and the wooden and stone sculptures covered in fresco, oils, acrylics, watercolours, ink and graphite, pieces that communicate with each other and transform the experience of the space into an installation-cum-artistic intervention. A whole array of techniques displays the mastery of a painter inseparable from his craft starting out with sketching, an idea jotted down in a notebook, which is later fleshed out on a variety of media.
Hence, the suite of works on Nepal or Buhtan paper from 2015-16 –Cypris, Vitrea, Hecuba, Nestira…– that bear the title of the names of the forty-eight varieties of the Morpho butterfly. A collection that evokes a lepidopteran airiness heightened by the fragility of the media: drawings executed on a butterfly’s wing. Not to mention the set of sculptures called Oz (2022), stone blocks in the shape of an upside-down “L” (LLuís LLeó?) from which hang pieces of paper that have been drawn on in wax crayons and pencil and which recall the decals used to transfer the drawing to fresco and are arranged in the manner of wayside marker stones. A suite that recalls the idea, at great cost to the painter, of habitable paintings which provide momentary “refuge” for the onlooker while exploring an oeuvre, Lleó’s, that is invariably “a journey of sorts”.
Lluís Lleó’s work mixes intimacy and overt appeals to the onlooker, firmness and insubstantiality, the expressivity of techniques and materials and a paring down of forms, a melting away of the frontiers between abstraction and figuration, the geometric and the organic, since his motives, even his least referential ones, always return to emotions, memories, landscapes or lived-in dwelling places.
Rosa Gutiérrez Herranz and Miguel Fernández-Cid, exhibition curators