The young Swiss artist presents her recent works in an exhibition composed of several watercolors on canvas and pastels with dreamlike shapes. This is the second venture of the gallery located in Carabanchel, after its name change (previously Intersticio) and location.
The first thing that catches your attention is its free and almost abstract strokes. Then, with a more careful look, the figures and landscapes, human beings, mountains and cloudy skies hidden under patches of red, blue or intense green are discovered.
Augusta Lardy Micheli (Geneva, 1994) arrives at the Belmonte gallery to present his latest compositions, which are halfway between figuration and blurred forms. A dozen works made over the past year make up Queroseno, the second exhibition organized at the gallery’s current headquarters, which was previously called Interstice.
“HIS COMPOSITIONS ARE HALFWAY BETWEEN FIGURATION AND BLURRED FORMS”
Ana Coronel de Palma and Sol Abaurrea started this joint project in March 2021. “We had both worked separately in great references in the art world such as Elba Benítez, Gagosian or Thaddaeus Ropac, but we had the dream of opening our own gallery,” explains Coronel de Palma.
That’s why they created Intersticio a year and a half ago. “At first we opened a headquarters in London with a third partner; Then we settled in Madrid, just after COVID-19. When the person in London left the project, we started again. The gallery is the same, we just changed the name to the current [Belmonte] and we settled in Carabanchel.”
With this new brand they debuted last October. Then they organized an exhibition by Andrés Izquierdo that has worked very well in terms of sales volume and audience attendance. Now, they have just inaugurated with Augusta Lardy Micheli Keroseno, a bet full of dreamlike and surreal scenes.
The exhibition can be visited until March 18, 2023 and will coincide in time with ARCO, a fair to which Belmonte attends with a selection of young authors among whom the Swiss artist stands out.
For now, the works that Lardy Micheli presents in the gallery demonstrate their technical richness. On the one hand, pastels with abstract lines serve to give free rein to experimentation. Although it is his canvases that attract the most attention.
The fact that they are painted in watercolor with plaster and oil gives the resulting work a unique singularity. The material of the fabric – in this case linen – also plays an important role, as it forces the author to execute her strokes more quickly and spontaneously.
Scenes such as Revoloteando sobre la tierra or El tiempo no tiene orillas can be memories of visited landscapes, such as the valleys of his native Switzerland or the London countryside where he currently lives. Or perhaps they are just imagined places, dreamed memories like those that usually flood Lardy Micheli’s work, characterized by his reflections on the transitory nature of being, the sublime and the subjective gaze.
