SHARES

Oblong Contemporary Art Gallery, located on Bluewaters Island, opens a new exhibition in Dubai: Fragments of Colour, a solo show by Manu Alguerò, a Catalan artist whose monumental paintings, including a huge gold background tryptic, will be on display until the next 25th of February 2023.

The exhibition is composed of ten large-scale works on canvas, most of them never shown before and created especially for the Dubai exhibition at Oblong Contemporary Art Gallery. All paintings are strictly immersed in the artist's tremendous world, which partly derives from the abstract expressionism art movement. In his works, Manu Alguerò puts together strong colors and very rapid gestures that creates a stunning visual impact.

Weaves, nuances, and reliefs emerge through the colors on the canvas to create a rich painting surface that envelops the viewers in an extraordinary vortex. It's a strong, artistic vigor, that tells the beauty of the universe and creation, while it reveals the artist's audacity and his ability to form figures and faces through a singular and unusual gesture that characterizes his works. All figures by Manu Alguerò live in this extraordinary pictorial technique that show and hide, at the same time, the subject created by the artist.

Starting from what can be defined as a nucleus, which is placed in the center of the canvas, Alguerò creates a very real explosion of colors, where the color itself, however, seems to escape even from the artist's hand in order to search its own space, create its own form, give life to a creative genesis that amazes for its beauty but, above all, for the movement that seems to be infinite.

Opposite to the force of the gesture, and almost to create a balance, the colors used by Alguerò are pale, amalgamated in a restricted chromatism and placed first on the background, which has the function to bring out the subject, the central nucleus of the work. The importance of backgrounds in Alguerò's work can be seen in every canvas, where a single color gives space and embraces the subject. Ideally prepared as a buon Fresco, smooth or spatulated and in some cases as a gold background, these technical and pictorial characteristics reveal a tribute to antique art, when the greatest Masters of antiquity expressed themselves in buon Fresco and in fondo oro (gold background).

Manu Alguerò, Catalan from Barcelona (Spain), is a sculptor and a stylist. His works are shown in permanent collections in Spain, to the Can Framis Museum and at Espais Volart Contemporary Art Museum, both in Barcelona. In Girona (Spain) are displayed at Can Mario Museum and Palau Solterra Museum. Not least, in Morocco, the Assilah Museum shows permanent works by Alguerò. He is also an award winner in art fairs in Tokyo, Oxford, and Amsterdam. Additionally, he won the Global Art Award for Newcomer Artist.

Mia Richa