The search for the unknown is an obsession that Ángel de la Peña has since he’s started painting. The task of transmitting through a painting composed of his feelings in an unconscious way while making it coherent in itself is a great dilemma that makes de la Peña to often question himself as a painter.
In this fall, ART in capitals proudly introduces you an opportunity to get into the personal world of the Spanish artist for the exploration of the unconscious minds. Ángel de la Peña, an artist who deems the parallel relationship between life and efforts, presents to the audience in Shanghai a conceptual and minimalist experience of art.
Born in 1955 in Madrid, Ángel de la Peña received his degree from the School of Architecture at Polytechnic University of Madrid. During his study, de la Peña combined his studies in architecture with his trainings in arts while researching for new painting techniques in a self-taught manner. As soon as he graduated from the University, de la Peña worked as both an architect and a painter. However, not until 1998 did the artist’s dedication to painting become exclusive.
Ángel de la Peña’s paintings follow a constructed process, seeking precision and a mix of outstanding techniques. His works are sober and elegant, seductive and integrating, and they made him among the first artists in the last generation who embraced Informalism.
De la Peña’s style is a combination of a distinguished technique, tidiness and mystery on a gesso background in which both oil and acrylic are mixed to attain a sensation of serenity. This particular style that de la Peña employs gathers a clear image of the depth of his conceptual virtuality.
Long obsessed with the search for the unknown, the artist expresses a complex concept in his paintings through the adaptation of an abstract language known as Mycenaean. By incorporating this symbolic ancient Greek language in his art, de la Peña’s works appear non-figurative. His paintings show a certain pictorial purity as well as equilibrium in their shapes and compositions. Although de la Peña uses simple symbols in his paintings, the compositions are far from being shallow. The backgrounds of his works show a certain profundity through the many layers applied on each of the painting, giving them a solid appearance that is lively, complicated, and insightful.
The artist wants us to think in this chaotic world through the simplicity of the forms and lines portrayed in his representations, as he claims that sensibility stands as the only entity he trusts because it helps him justify one’s behavior.
What Critics Say
Mario Antolín Paz (President of the Spanish Art Critics’ Association – 2010)
“Ángel de la Peña constructs each painting balancing with exquisite sensibility of the concept and the emotion, the skill and the pictorial sensuality, in such a way that each of his work transcends beyond its own material body, unleashing spirit and mystery.”
Antonio Cobos (Dean of the Art Critics’ – 2005)
“Among much mimetic tendencies, lacking in originality, and what is even worse, lacking in sincerity, as of those today proliferating in the wide and heterogeneous panorama of the Abstract Expressionism of Art Informel and the abstraction, Ángel de la Peña is a fortunate exception, not only for his rigor and technical grasp that are above any excruciating improvisation, but also for the intrinsic beauty of his work in which, without any concession or trick, he captures his personal creative vision.”
Carlos Delgado (Art Critic – 2008)
“He has consolidated a vocabulary with immense lucidity and has settled himself in the rhetorical purification and in the expressive concretion. Paradoxically, this lucidity is obtained through the use of discordant elements that support at all time his full autonomy. In fact, we might say that the visual intensity that his paintings possess is originated in the research of the disagreement of the formal resources, and, of course, of a pondered complex elaboration that places each element in the most fitting sphere.”
