06/06 – 07/07/2019

Estudio sobre colapso y calma


Elena Rato

Noreña, 1979

Dance, graphite and oil were part of the individual growth that has marked the life and evolution of someone whose vocation was unquestionable. Always intuitive, without fear and without errors, this is how the painting of a young Elena Rato (Noreña, 1979) flowed, who, at twelve, did not need instructions to obtain the desired tones. Specialized in painting from the University of Fine Arts of Salamanca and in Scenography from the Polytechnic of Valencia, Elena completed her training with graphic design studies, litho and calcographic techniques, 2D and 3D design. Since 2001, she focused her artistic development on performing activities, both individually and collectively, claiming identity and gender through objects of women’s clothing. The importance of the textual and the narrative, the influence of pop art, violent images and spatial expansion, gave way to the need to do something from the plastic experimentation. Thus emerged “Yankee Pride”, a first piece that marked a way of working whose beginning and end will be inseparable throughout its pictorial evolution.


At the beginning of her painting, black and white predominated on boards with small shades of color where, little by little, she laid the foundations of a creative line based on the plastic substrate. Back then, the artist began to deposit two fundamental layers that were gonna be a recurring determinant and inherent in all her work, the conceptual and the pictorial. These layers – which origins are based on abstract expressionism and informalism– will be transformed into a refined painting, contained and revised from the rational window of new technologies. In the progression of their series they begin and end, recover, vary, juxtapose between planes of color, flat, iridescent. She broke with this tradition towards more rational or more figurative, distorted or dismembered parameters, on ocher and black backgrounds, with frozen or expanded spots and then, the differences arose. This was her opportunity to materialize the pictorial time through works that contained painted documentation of an action, which she reflected in consecutive images that made up the same piece. All this made sense in the expansion of her iconographic paradigm, the tangles. These spots develop in an autonomous, organic, geometric and subtle way, which seizes the canvas and exceeds its limits, inside and outside the painting, from the inside to the outside, pretending to be a painting and an expression in the same space-time.


Her Study on collapse and calm transgresses in the series and their evolution, more finished, curlier and turned, where space and time unfold and where the infinitely large meets the infinitely small. Now, past, present and future become understandable to all those who share a calm scenario, where the information is given in the same period of time. Roses, yellows or blacks predominate confronting the looks, the deformation and the replica, the original and the formal, thus demonstrating the depth that the represented forms hide. In this sample, prior to words, perceptions and gestures, canvases are more solid, less doubtful.

María Martínez Vallina