Lino Lago: Multipolar

Join us for Lino Lago's, third solo exhibition, titled Multipolar. This exhibition introduces the idea of confrontation between different worlds and cultures — a multipolar world — challenged with our dreamt idea of globalization. The artist represents these concepts by confronting different and sometimes opposing paths and styles in a single painting.

Lino Lago is a Spanish-born artist, who continuously pushes the boundaries of contemporary art practices. Painting with technically traditional oil paints and inspired by the imagery of classical European portraits, Lago’s work has a distinctly contemporary feel.

The artist began to explore the juxtapositions that arose between the formal realism of classic art and the abstract aesthetics of contemporary art in earlier projects including Paint Over Paint. Whilst influenced by the art academies of the late 18th and early 19th century, there is no doubt that both, conceptually and visually, Lago’s work belongs to the milieu of contemporary art.

In his California solo exhibition Multipolar, the artist treats his viewers to snippets of a portrait through squiggles across monochrome canvases. The audience is left to wonder if a full Renaissance-like painting actually exists underneath the solid block of color? Or maybe the artist deliberately painted small portions of a portrait on a small surface? In any case, the eye-catching series lets us indulge in the juxtaposition of contemporary and classic art.

The distinctly bold abstract line disturbs the conventional portrait form, imitating the mark of a digital brush. But doing so, Lago re-claims traditional artistic methods and, in a way, critiques the contemporary art world’s notions of operating outside of any historical context. Instead, he alludes to the history of art. His distinct minimalist use of line and abstract shape succeeds in creating beautifully striking works as well as discussing theoretical concepts of reality.

“Lago’s marriage of sober traditional representation and intoxicating modernist color shows that the infinite variety of creative possibilities would not exist without pluralism.”

-Donald Kuspit, Art Critic, White Hot Magazine

“Sober representation, in which fresh, luminous swabs of color-filled paint, some forcefully gestural as though flung on the surface of the Old Master work they partially cover, some subliminally biomorphic, some geomorphic, seem imprinted on the brilliantly copied Old Master work.  Each has its autonomy, but they inform each other to make unusual aesthetic sense.  The  museum-worthiness and somber grandeur of the traditional masterpieces is seemingly attacked and compromised—marred and mocked—by the gloriously radiant colors of pure abstraction—the colors that Kandinsky saw at the expense of Monet’s haystack.  But in aesthetic fact the freshness and immediacy of the flashy spasms and blobs of color give Lago’s treasured Old Masterpieces a new lease on expressive life, not to say a fresh sense of aesthetic purpose and presence, even as the cognitive complexity and cultural meaning of the grand traditional paintings—one by Caravaggio, another by Peter Lely—give the “non-objective” colors a sense of conceptual purpose they do not usually have. They have not only been raised from the dead by the color, and the color has been given new expressive power and spiritual meaning by being injected into the dead old masterpieces, revitalizing them and rescuing them from oblivion.”

– Donald Kuspit, Art Critic, White Hot Magazine, “The Perils of Pluralism: Conflict In The Art Arena”