THE FORCE OF LIGHT
Ismael Lagares seems to have set himself a single objective as a painter from the beginning: more than painting, bringing painting into the world in its fullness, materializing it in pure and absolute presence . This is not a new proposition, of course. Those who have undertaken this path of purity against the grain of almost all our pictorial tradition generally share the same desire. Their purpose is ultimately reduced to clearing away all mediation of meanings, representations, intentions, concepts or contexts that may come between the direct contact between the painted object as a body of plastic, purely physical and sensorial qualities, and the sensitivity of the person exposed to it, without anything to hinder or interfere. It is an Adamic (or Edenic) aspiration that has used two opposite strategies; one of them seeks to reduce painting to its essence of light and color, stripping it of its material component and added meanings as far as possible; The other, in the opposite direction, exacerbates what painting has as a material object that is in itself a sovereign and self-sufficient support and vehicle of those same qualities of light and color.
The two series presented in this new individual with Aurora Vigil-Escalera They are a new step in that continued and coherent evolution , from very different purposes, supported respectively by the predominance of white or color. In the first of them, surely the most refined of its author in strictly formal terms, Lagares opens new expressive territories based on the balance between his monochromatic series and the vehemence of color This time, dispersed in small blooms of pure pigments or in spots and flat strokes, he gives all the prominence to the ceramic pieces, integrated with the whiteness of the background: a kind of great visual respite that clears and oxygenates the gaze and calms the forms without renouncing in any way the usual effects of materiality, movement and physical presence that define his language. Faithful also to his love of what is handmade, to the artisanal, Lagares does not shy away from integrating the ornamental through gold and silver decorations in his glazed ceramics, also present in sculptures with a strong nouveau and sumptuous evocation. The result has a lot of still life except that, far from invoking the melancholy of still lifes, these bodies that suggest a fusion of flowers, seashells or remains of some luxurious household goods appear as if crystallized in their movement, preserved in full life from the erosion of time.
This exercise in chromatic discipline overflows, on the contrary, in the series based on colors: a feast of harmonies and contrasts based on a background tone on which graphics and textures are displayed, clots and sinuous cords of paint and matte and fleshy ceramic corollas that radiate a lively and acidic light. In this collection, Lagares seems to have given himself over with a not inconsiderable childlike grace and greater carefreeness to playing with recognizable figures from the world beyond painting, as in a festive explosion of creativity which makes one think of the remains of a celebration or of the gardens that a child would conceive and model, but which comes, as always in this painter, from the technical mastery and the firmness in his usual struggle: allowing the viewer to literally engage in hand-to-hand combat with the painting.