María Lara

Throughout her career as an artist, which began in the early seventies, María Lara (Loja, Granada, 1940) has developed a body of work focused on sensory and emotional impressions of all kinds. In her work, these impressions are translated into simple and powerful elements — very often bands and lines — that, on the one hand, synthesize these impressions but on the other turn them into pure plasticity. With a great economy of means, since she uses almost exclusively lines and stripes of various colours, the artist manages to capture a highly refined and polished synthetic language in canvases and papers. Nevertheless, in spite of the conscious restriction in media and graphics that she rigorously applies in her work (her working method may seem at first sight severe and even rigidly scheduled), the result is highly emotional and evocative. Her work does not represent incidental or factual aspects of reality but succeeds in conveying impressions as vivid as they are subtle. Granadan María Lara’s paintings and drawings display a high degree of chromatic value and subtlety, with colour intensely vibrating in the succession of vertical or horizontal lines that make up her works. Apparently silent, her pieces claim an interiority and intimacy far removed from the spectacular or the trivial and focus instead on an abstract and refined intensity that remains, nonetheless, full of emotion. Indeed, Lara’s work subtly manages to transmit day-to-day sensations related to ineffable subjects such as light, air, spatial reverberation, everyday life or spirituality, among others.

Excerpt from text Perceptions, Records and Impressions by Manuel Olveira.