Review: Marianela Gallardo

Marianela Gallardo's man is a superman, but there's nothing Nietzschean about him. He's a powerful man, emphatic, determined, yet he lives for her, the woman, whom he wraps in a mystical, unarguable embrace. But it isn't a protective embrace, it isn't a condescending embrace. Marianela Gallardo's man doesn't embrace the woman to reassert his virility, he longs for a spiritual fusion. He is the new man who embraces women.

We don't know whether the Argentine painter had Stieg Larsson in mind when she was looking for a title for this series of artworks starring couples, but a good number of them look like an attempt to make amends for those men who don't love women: you know how it is, generalizing is very dangerous, but we do it all the time.

Marianela Gallardo's amantes is one of the most significant artworks of the recent period of this artist based in Menorca. The dark graphic quality of her early days is behind her now. In this canvas the naked couple make love on an Edenic bed. But apart from the grass and the flowers, the rest of the composition is ruled by the human figures with their overwhelming sculptural solidity.

It's a regular device in Marianela's artwork, almost an obsession: the enlarging of hands and feet in her human figures, feet that reaffirm the link between human beings and the ground, the earth they come from, and hands that symbolize our capacity to act... in every sense.

In these other Amantes, the Patagonian artist centres her composition on conveying a sense of rhythm, of passion in motion. Woman and man shut themselves away in their emotional rapture with a movie kiss. The spiral of undulating lines created by the position of the intertwined figures radiates a gentle cadence: it's the rhythm of love, of course. The artist also adds colour both to the clothes and to the sky, which helps round off this feeling of dreamed love that wraps the whole artwork. Or to put it another way: looking at this artwork makes you want to love.

The embrace as a motif and rhythm as a compositional key are not, in any case, new elements in Marianela Gallardo's artwork. A few years ago she already gave us that El amor de los ángeles, another large-format canvas, landscape this time, which conveys that contrast between the rhythmic spiral of the lovers and the solidity of their figures, concentrating their weight in the lower part of the painting.

The naive-looking faces that appeared in El amor de los ángeles come back for another series of artworks known as Voladoras y Nadadoras, women who flow among blues and whites, in undefined spaces, guided by the promise of a divine harmony. In La voladora, the sky blue melts the woman into the sky and the stars. A seagull is her partner on this spiritual trip in which, once again, the Argentine painter pauses on a compositional level to generate rhythmic tensions through the position of the figures' limbs and the pattern of the stars, done with a pointillist technique.

Less decorative is the painting La nadadora de la quinta, in which Marinela modernizes a classical technique related to sculpture. First she creates an informalist block almost spontaneously, and that block is what gives the artwork its texture, and then she extracts the figures from that block through a more rational process. Aside from the creative technique, in this artwork we again find the taste for figurative distortions that help give this swimmer the impression of a totemic woman, a timeless matriarch diving supreme among coloured fish.

Using the same technique we've just seen but in reverse, we have another of her most recent bets: La danza del viento. It's a painting that keeps several of the creative principles that are usual in the Argentine's artwork but conveys very different sensations: the use of greys turns these figures into stony blocks with bloody splashes. It's a less kindly, less dreamy painting, more expressionist and more disturbing. In this dance it isn't the wind blowing, it's death.

A painter with a long career despite her youth, Marianela Gallardo started out painting pizza boxes when she arrived in Spain and has ended up becoming an artistic reference point in Menorca, with a host of exhibitions and cultural initiatives and her artworks exported to different countries.

We invite you to visit Marianela Gallardo's gallery on Artelista.