TRY ME ON by Rosa Granados

P O R T R A I T S

Passion and seclusion is the red thread that links the works of Rosa Granados. With enthusiasm, she undertakes every new project, searching, wandering and experimenting which afterwards relentlessly become lines, colours, stains and glazes. And, at the same time, she withdraws into a furious solitude with her watercolours and her pencils until shape and intention appear. Rosa Granados knows how to leave the Bedlam outside to listen herself, to her inner murmurs.

For years her work and her interest in art have covered several fields: photography, drawing, painting, watercolours, fashion design, silk screen printing, video and performance art. Today she brings to this university a collection of watercolour portraits where we can observe some characteristics of her latest works: on the one hand, a work in small format of brush strokes and glazes directly applied on paper with no preliminary drawing. But, on the other hand, the emergence of a bold almost brazen range of colours with oranges, purples, reds, blues and browns. This baroque category of her brushwork takes us away from her previous collection of almost monochromatic portrait paintings and at the same time confirms the character of searching that her works always have and the importance of experimentation, essential in this exhibition.

This free brushwork gives an impression of agility and immediacy, a freedom that in some works creates an atmosphere of vulnerable beings, affected by the storms of life, as in “Study for a portrait” or “Woman against a door”. In the latter, the hazy face and the glazy hair even suggest a world of restless night dew. But in other works, such as “The red shirt” or “Smoking”, the small repeated purple, reddish and blue brush strokes of the heads show us an ephemeral and luminous world.

The artist wanted to go back to her origins. Focusing on the teaching of one of her masters in Córdoba who introduced Cézanne to her, she began fearlessly covering the blank paper with colourful stains that became shapes and ideas. Ideas that later, as the hours went by, became these portraits that are finally facing us.

Helena Golanó