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MARÍA GÓMEZ


Salamanca 1953

Lives and works in Madrid

 

 

 

 

Linked to the neo-metaphysical painting resulting from his participation in The return of the prodigal Son (El retorno del hijo pródigo) exhibition.

 

María Gómez appreciates the process of artistic and spiritual quest in the painting by creating a metaphysical space where encounters occur of typical mythical scenes of the classical tradition.

 

Gómez tells of prodigious events of an intimate experience in transforming archetypal images featuring primitives. Her painting has a recognizable but incomprehensible aspect, since the author plays with revealing secrets through the perverse traps of representation and unravels the mysteries through enlightenment. The use of false perspectives and the complex connections between constructions and landscapes contribute to their own confusion of dream processes where the author questions the relationship between painting and reality.

 

Her investigations on the poetics of light as a physical phenomenon and symbolic element are significant. In her painting, she studies the corporeality of the visible spectrum, coming from natural and artificial sources and the impact on matter in day and night scenes. It also recovers its allegorical meaning as indoor lighting and path to knowledge.

 

Gómez explores the boundaries between painting and writing, experimenting on two parallel lines of work, painting images which the text reveals and transcribing texts on a canvas in a defensive act relevant of the book. Reading, as a conceptual and aesthetic phenomenon, becomes a central theme in her work. The iconography of reading from the library to the lector, it represents in abstract and bare scenery where the revelations occur.

 

The figure of amanuensis represents, in the work of Gómez, the solitary meditation on which the author transcribes in silence. The book is revisited from painting as a formal and conceptual reference. Her library primarily consists of initiation or mystical books, highlighting the lives of saints or dealing with the pre-Socratic knowledge. Of particular importance are the readings of The Contemplation of the mysteries, the work of the mystic Sufí, a Muslim philosopher and poet from Andalusian Ibn Arabi about the nature of existence and man’s relationship with the comprehensive reality. The book describes 14 visions related to the ascension to the stars, a theme that connects the constellations that are responsible for one of her most representative series.

 

 

Among the pictorial references the following painters are highlighted: Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi or Balthus.

 

 

Consulted bibliography: Cereceda, Miguel, “Velos y desvelos de la pintura de María Gómez”; De Castro, Mª Antonia, “ Mira como brilla el reflejo del agua sobre los árboles”, in the exhibition catalogue María Gómez. Tercer libro, Cádiz, Fundación Provincial de Cultura, 2001. Cereceda, Miguel, “Conversación”, in the exhibition catalogue María Gómez. El escritor o las lectoras, Zamora, Junta de Castilla y León, 2003.

 

MARÍA GÓMEZ  > SELECTED Works

 

Observatory > Artist