In this show, Miguel Angel Campano exhibited 21 thematically related paintings made over the last two years. In each of the paintings, he crowds different structures onto compact surfaces; these structures are fragmented in surprising ways that obviate any harmonious resolution. The painting becomes a depthless window through which objects are seen. Campano reinterprets two distinct genres: landscapes are treated as if they were still lifes and still lifes as if they were landscapes. In several of the paintings, the two genres are seemlessly integrated.

Disparate elements come into relation with one another: houses, moons, trees, and hills are grouped with fruits, knives, pitchers, goblets, and candles. Their sizes are not in proportion to one another: a rural building can have the same height as a goblet or a candle. As in dreams, the images do not occupy a specific place and are superimposed; it seems as if, in the process of painting, Campano wants to make a formal representation that coincides with the contemplation of the painting itself. Colors are simple and clearly defined: contrasting greens, blues, reds, blacks, browns, and grays. Campano’s drawing style is very architectonic; his lines occasionally multiply in disorderly profusion to amplify the superimposition. In some cases, one painting frames another, delimiting a zone that can be seen as its opposite. In NP20, 1988, a landscape of greens is crisply delineated against the black profile of hills and uninhabited houses. It surrounds a smaller rectangle with a black landscape in white outlines, luminous as freshly fallen snow. In his still lifes, line is suggestive of objects; volumes seen under the light of a candle flame are cast on an irregular ground. In these closed landscapes without roads, or these still lifes where order and disorder, figuration and its negation, coexist syncretically in a world of their own, expression confirms the exigencies of a search and an experimentation Campano has imposed upon himself.

—Menene Gras Balaguer

Translated from the Spanish by Hanna Hannah.