Review: Àngels Estella Pont

Watercolour may well be the painting technique that comes closest to dreams. Because we don't dream in firm lines or sturdy shapes, but in blurs, atmospheres and omens. Dreams are intuitions, like watercolours, where patches of colour are the lamps that light up meaning. That's what the painting of Àngels Estella Pont is like, a subtle, fragile light, but enough to find the way into dreams.

Off to meet the light

A good part of Àngels Estella Pont's current output is made up of those watercolours that suggest places once lived in, places that later come back to memory as dreamed atmospheres. As a painter once said, watercolour is a demanding technique because it puts the artist under tension, but that tension makes it easier to express the instant, not just what the eyes take in at a given moment, but what they feel: that link between sense and sensibility is what makes you fall in love with watercolour.

As Àngels Estella Pont herself says, artworks like Payne bring the “authenticity and courage of improvisation”. You don't need an explosion of bright colours to carry the viewer to a particular place, to wrap them in a particular atmosphere. Greys and yellows in an artwork where past and present, shadow and light, seem to melt into one another.

We are talking also has that enigmatic spell of suggestion: lines blurring into buildings and patches that bring golden and mauve reflections back to life. Like a good conversation you replay in your head, leaning on its sharpest lines, watercolour makes the most telling details of a memory pulse.

And speaking of memories, travel. As in LLançà, Costa Brava or Puerta de Sevilla, Àngels Estella Pont revisits her travels, her discoveries of light and colour, whether a step away from home or at the other end of the world. Because there's something almost childlike about travelling, an innocence that works like an elixir of eternal youth: the best way to daydream and to scare off the ghost of routine, which is the waiting room of defeat.

But there's life beyond watercolour for Àngels too. In Market One you can see the same creative drive as in her watercolours, keeping her taste for small formats but using oil on canvas. Patches of colour that set a lively market morning humming: the buildings and the stalls wrapped in a dreamy aura, in an intimate, almost oneiric atmosphere, a step away from abstraction. An abstraction she reaches in Pink: a harmonious sea of pink, white and gold that's like a boat ride through comforting dreams.

Warm abstraction on wood

Beyond her work as a watercolourist, which has seen her selected for several prizes, Àngels Estella Pont experiments with other formulas in series that combine sculpture with colour, as in Forever Color or Forever Natural. It's no accident that this artist turns to wood as the base for these experiments. That material always stirs warm emotions, not only through the eye but through the touch that runs along its grain, its grooves and hollows.

Àngels reuses used materials to breathe new life into them, new suggestions. They're small, delicate pieces, but unpolished, unsweetened: just pure colour alongside little blocks of wood laid over mostly vertical pieces.

It's not hard to picture Àngels Estella Pont in her studio, surrounded by pieces like Forever Blue, imagining their aesthetic possibilities through the rhythm of those lines in the wood that form whimsical, always suggestive shapes. And then, at a given moment, adding a tone that sparks a singular contrast between the warmth of the wood and the texture of the colour. That's the work of Àngels Estella Pont, a stroll through the imagination of colour that lights up intimate dreams, whether through the suggestion of watercolour or the texture of wood.