2024 Fine Cracks – Gallery Rosenblut & Friedman, Madrid
Fine Cracks: Paul Campbell, Michel Alexis, and Alba Escayo This is the third time these artists have exhibited their work together. Although they don’t share a common style, nor are they a collective that follows specific rules for creating, their works complement each other. All three share certain elements of Abstract Expressionism (such as an attention to the materiality of the painting or a search for the unpredictable in creation). However, the way they paint and the works they produce are radically different, yet they work together. Campbell connects us with the earthly, with the transience of the present; Escayo projects us into space, into an immensity pierced by vivid colors; and Alexis delves into the underworld of the unconscious, to recover a past in constant dissolution. Paul Campbell began painting on canvas, like any painter, until one day he took a steel sphere, covered it with paint, and threw it onto a slightly tilted canvas. The sphere moved up and down the canvas, leaving traces of its journey, parabolas, curves that didn’t come from a human gesture. He then began to explore different ways to intervene in the canvas without using his hand. His first exhibition in New York was called Remote Control, a series of paintings created with his children’s remote-controlled cars. The wheels, dipped in paint, produced mechanical and unpredictable patterns; then, with his hand, he sought to balance order and chaos.
In his latest series, Campbell has reproduced the tar scars left by repaired cracks in the pavement. First, he fills these scars with paint, then covers them with fabric and drives over them. The result is minimalist and unrestrained; the lines are thick, like fragments of a colossal calligraphy, yet possessing a delicate harmony. Anyone who sees the works in this series will never see these tar scars the same way again. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold, these works highlight the beauty of the marks left by the passage of time.
For Michel Alexis, the intervention of fabric is also a path of constant exploration, but in his works, Campbell’s minimalist abstractionism does not predominate, but rather one reminiscent of dreams, as if constructed from images of a pre-verbal past, before language gave shape to reality. As a child, Alexis would lie in bed and stare up at his bedroom ceiling, a white square adorned with an intricate frieze, and playfully fill in the empty spaces with Baroque exuberance. “The basic structure of my paintings derives from that childhood ritual,” he confesses.
Alexis used to be a sculptor. Today, he sculpts his canvases. First, he covers the canvas with acrylic paste and then glues rice paper onto it, making fine wedge-shaped cuts through which he lets the liquid paint run, expanding in unpredictable smears. Alexis then removes the excess paint from the rice paper and repeats the process with another color. Little by little, different hues appear over the fine cracks. With a scalpel, he continues sculpting the canvas and removing pieces of rice paper, as if he were an archaeologist excavating a primitive language hidden within the canvas. The bare work is an organic, harmonious unity, like an encapsulated image of childhood.
Alba Escayo also creates her works through a process of elimination. However, while Alexis covers the empty ceiling of her childhood, Escayo discards the horror vacui of the Baroque and gives a central role to space and silence. “I think of my art as the construction of a haiku,” he notes. In his creative process, as if writing one of those very brief poems, Escayo pare down the lines, diminishes the gesture, and reduces the range of colors to the minimum that allows for the representation of infinity. Like a haiku, his work seems to emerge from a spontaneous epiphany.
Some time ago, Escayo wanted to make large-scale works and found a ship’s sail, a 25-meter-high triangle of canvas, with rust stains, stitched patches, cracks, and wrinkles that revealed its own history. Escayo cut pieces of different sizes to paint on. The thickness of the canvas overflows the two dimensions and, as if alive, folds, changing its shape depending on the space it finds itself in. “It’s more a sculpture than a painting,” Escayo concludes, and curiously, despite the differences, we feel as if we’re listening to Alexis talking about his own work.
By bringing these artists together in one space, we witness three paths of abstract art that are united, like magnets, by opposition. In Escayo’s works, there is emptiness and colors; in Campbell’s, there is emptiness but no colors; and in Alexis’s, there are colors but no emptiness. One of these paths is guided by the presence of space, another by the passage of time, and the third by the images of memory, as if they were three ingredients from which a human being is made.
