Llanes, 1984
MON CABRALES
Bachelor in Fine Arts from the University of Basque Country (Bilbao UPV/EHU), with a Higher Degree in Printed Graphics at the School of Art of Oviedo, and with a Master’s Degree in Teacher Training at the University of Oviedo, Mon Cabrales has held solo exhibitions at the Valey Culture Centre in Castrillón, in Borrón art gallery and in “Dos Ajolotes” art space in Oviedo. His artistic qualities also led him to be selected to participate in the National Art Contest of Luarca in 2016, and as a finalist for the Medal “En recuerdo de Kelly 1960-2013” of the Oviedo Art Fair of 2017.
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From 1770, the neoclassical sculptor Franz Xaver Messershcmidt began to create some busts in which he captured highly exaggerated facial expressions, with which he tried to recreate the hallucinations and paranoias he suffered due to madness. This is just one of the many examples of artists who, throughout history, have used art as a way to free themselves from trauma, to explore the mind for capturing their fears on their works. Through his drawings, Mon Cabrales also explores those traumatic experiences, those bitter memories that haunts us. In his portraits, made on paper, with pencil and graphite, there is a superposition of images that belong to different planes, different moments that suggest a space-time displacement through slight transparencies.
Each portrait is a human map narrated in a single scene with a multiplicity of sequences that make a face which we look at it with attonishment, that comes from a neutral white background space, unfolds through time and space, looks at us in a defiant way and forces us to face our own nightmares.
Mon’s work is read and interpreted layer by layer and in the reading process we discover a new and different face from the previous one, the expression changes and the gesture hardens, the story changes and becomes more shocking as we move forward it. Multiplicity of sequences that define a face to speak to us of the complex, diverse and why not, dramatic, human identity. A human deconstruction that paradoxically we need to understand the intrinsic of our own being.
