Elena Rato

Noreña, Asturias, 1979

The artistic project that I’ve been developing in recent years it’s a frontier work, passionately attached to painting, which brings together a convergence of elements that come from different and compartmentalized series until now. I identify the process by which the different creative lines have permeated as a plastic substrate that is depositing layers on two levels, conceptual and aesthetic.

Starting from a position close to abstract expressionism, I’ve been purging the forms and transforming my work into a contained painting. Twisting the informalist concept of the stain and the force of expressionism, I’ve come with a review of informalism from a more rational window, supported with the so-called new technologies.

The leitmotiv that visually unifies these paintings is the imperious presence of what I’ve been calling “marañas” (‘tangles’), black stains that I began to develop in 2005 and have remained present ever since as a iconographic paradigm of my particular abstraction. The stains develop themselves with a sort of autonomy; sometimes they have a more organic appeal, but in other cases goes to geometric forms, represented like little and subtle graphs or taking over almost the entire canvas and even exceeding its limits.

It’s worth noticing that both inside or outside the painting, the “marañas” (‘tangles’) are removed with surgical precision; pictorially reproduced on the inside, and with vinyl processed by digital tools on the outwards, pretending to be painting and expression.

Adding a new conceptual element -or layer- in recent works, precisely this concept is transferred literally, first in the creation of sketches through computer programs that promote this work “by layers” and then deposited pictorially on the canvas. The image is reproduced mimetic on the canvas from the screen, frozen gestures pierced by the infographic sieve in a kind of pictorical-digital hybridization.