COLOR DRAWING

Graphite, watercolor and acrylic with airbrush on paper.

Size 22.9 x 29 cm. ( 9.01 x 11.41 in. )

Year of realization 2006.

Signed in the bottom left of the piece.

One of the versions made for USA.

Painting has always seemed torn between an inward and an outward gaze: between vision and perception, between our dreams and the concrete, highly politicized conditions framing our comprehension of the world and what it might become. Today is no different. After a period in which the medium has been dominated by process-based abstraction, the figure – and representation with it – is ascendant again. But, if the 1990s and 2000s saw artists such as John Currin distorting classical form while others, following Gerhard Richter, mimicked photography, today’s figuration displays a distinctly different character. Gone, for the most part, are the echoes of old masters; gone, too, are the blurs of photorealism. What takes their place, instead, is a highly idiosyncratic approach filtered through pronounced affect, comic-book and sci-fi aesthetics, dreamy narratives and an eagerness to engage with our political moment without forfeiting the sensuousness of the medium.

David Geers (Sotheby's) 

The challenge that the feminine ideal represents is like a dream, linked to the concept of natural force that moves the world and all the burdens of perversion and provocation that personally gives me the theme is, in my work, one of the keys that attract me.

Luis Royo