The Valencia-based Plastic Murs art gallery and print shop opened their most recent group show on November 3rd, showing works by five young Spanish artists – Aarón Duval, Iñigo Sesma, Jose Luis Ceña, Mikel Del Río and Sebas Velasco. Lugares Comune (Common Places) is focused on portraying mundane reality using artistic tools and a photographic approach.
Depicting common places with classic painting as a medium creates visual memorials filled with urban sensitivity and the desire to transcend the ephemeral. This poetic approach to celebrate and represent the most ordinary aspects of life is what these five painters have in common. Utilizing the richness of brushwork, the effectiveness of light or overexposure, as well as documentary-like frames as guidelines for their work, these artist are creating mementos of urban life in the 21st century in a similar manner to how classic painters did. Using oils as their primarily technique, they are creating metaphors of wild youth (Duval), playing with dichotomy between the dark and light (del Rio), skillfully portraying both people and their often decaying surrounding (Velasco), representing the social and historical context of their reality (Sesma) or painting the joy of life or the strangeness of dreams and the absurd (Ceña).
