Juan Navarro Baldeweg’s show was one of this year’s key exhibitions of Castilian painting. Despite the adjective “new” applied to his art, Baldeweg is hardly a newcomer, having shown his work, although not copiously, for more than twenty years. A professor at the Escuela Técnica de Arquitectura de Madrid, from 1971 to 1975 he lived in the United States, working at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There his development as a painter was influenced by his surroundings and by his research in video. Having gone through a conceptual stage he has now

The work of Menchu Lamas is a good example of how abstraction has evolved toward figuration in a coherent way, without an abrupt break. The figures in her paintings fill the picture plane; they are not merely fitted into a formal structure but themselves comprise that structure, providing heavy vertical, diagonal, horizontal, and curved shapes which give the painting its fundamental directional lines. This is a figuration bent on structural problems, but Lamas also skillfully introduces ambiguity through the selection of her thematic repertory.

In these two shows, featuring large works, Lamas