Barcelona artist Alejandro Miras works in watercolour, a technique known for its delicacy. There's no room for overly abrupt gestures or thick impasto the way there is in oil painting. But that doesn't mean a watercolourist can't achieve, through a loose brushstroke, emphatic colours or layers of washes, an unsettling effect that has nothing to do with the placidness the genre has traditionally been associated with.
That's what happens, for example, with Paisaje urbano lluvioso: an expressionist composition reproducing the blurred corner of any city, as if seen from the window of a moving car, a metaphor for life today, hurried and impersonal.
The passers-by set within the architectural reference are only recognisable as such from the waist down. The face stays hidden in black shadow, mixed in with urban elements like the shop awnings, painted in deep red and terracotta. And all of it wrapped in the rainy atmosphere of the place, which the artist recreates brilliantly.
In his scenes far from the bustling metropolitan heart, like the views of Barceloneta beach, Avinguda del Tibidabo or Ciutat Vella, Miras softens the tones, still earthy but lighter, with some cool touches, and although he still applies several washes, the result lets you better appreciate the transparency of watercolour and that luminous patina the artist knows so well how to achieve.
Charcoal drawing also stands out in his output: the mercat de Santa Catalina or the port of Barcelona are sketched in a prism of strokes of varying intensity, from the darkest black to the most subtle grey, strokes that assert themselves and blur in a weave so alive that at any moment the charcoal-furrowed paper seems about to turn into a photograph, into one of those old daguerreotypes invented to compete with the sketch in immediacy.
Visit Alejandro Miras' gallery at: alejandromiras.artelista.com
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