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
