Mine Eyes Dazzle

Eugène Delacroix said «When subject, form and line first touch our thoughts, color has no sense for intelligence but every power on sensibility».

It is a colorful flanerie that sobering galerie offers in this exhibition : color sculpted by neon – «color-light» Matisse used to say, or laid in large flat areas. Color, indeniably linked to light, has always been used by artists to express a personal and intimate language that belongs to the subjective world of our feelings and impressions defines us only. It is also thanks to color that we observe and understand the world, and it is associated to all of our senses and perceptions. The multimedia American artist Esther Ruiz and the Spanish painter Juan De La Rica offer various colorful propositions that explore both in surface and in depth the possibilities offered by color.

Juan De La Rica

The seeming simplicity of Juan De La Rica work reflects a wish of analyzing effects of technique on well-known iconographic types such as portrait or religious painting, but also to divert and modernize them. The synthetical line testifies of an excellent technical mastery of the medium used – oil painting – and a keen sense of perspective and volume through expressive and stylized compositions. He combines a Basque traditional pictorial style with comics or american Pop Art that shows through the pure line and large colorful areas.

Esther Ruiz

“I look forward to individualize color, as I realized that there is a full fledged living world in every color, and I am trying to express these worlds” said Yves Klein. Esther Ruiz also expresses her intimate worlds with color, that she sculpts thanks to fluorescent neons. Her artworks, with abstract and intriguing shapes, invite us to enter another reality through her light wells. Rigidity of the mirror contrasts with the fascinating and dazzling light of the neon, and thus distorts the spectator’s expectations, while creating infinite games of echoes and reflections.

Inès Molière