Text by Carmen de Ayora
El paso de las dos hermanas | 2018 | Óleo, acrílico y collage sobre lino | 97 x 162 cm
THE NECESSARY PROFUNDITY
A conflicted universe writhes vigorously and obstinately in search of delicacy, not ceasing until it finds it, passing through projections and reflections, creating structures and symmetries. Magic creatures come to save us by organizing the chaos. They reconcile themselves with the complexity, they profoundly penetrate it , sublimating it into revolution, producing a unique vibration which tells us that our emotions are our strength and feelings are our power.
| 2018 | Acrílico y collage sobre papel | 50 x 56 cm
Idoia Montón’s process has the vitality needed to survive reality by painting it; by transforming it, transgressing it and transubstantiating it. The things which allow us to make art are sacred; our ideas, our feelings and our revolutions. And the place where we produce it is also sacred, the blessed artist’s studio, or the house or the bedroom. Wherever the creation takes place, it is ever-present in Idoia Montón’s paintings.
Ocaso | 2017 | Acrílico y collage sobre lino | 89 x 116 cm
The artist invites us to play a game of tensions: to keep thought at a distance and uncover what stirs and fascinates us through the language of art. She does this by unveiling mysteries in order to create new ones from untiring emotional truth towards certainty, where what is represented is loved, cared for and offered up.
2666 | 2018 | Acrílico y collage sobre lino | 97 x 130 cm
Idoia enraptures us in the true experience of the struggle of existence. She makes conflicts between our reality and our desire sublime with her creations. Her dialogues, in painting or photographic collage, take us to infinity and invite us to travel around it and then return to our finite state, cured and brimming with the energy of art. And then we are taken back again; her visual structures don’t allow us to rest, we want to keep looking, to be captivated by what she does, by her freedom.
La caza de brujas | 2015 | Óleo, acrílico y collage sobre lino | 116 x 89 cm
Idoia Montón is a creature who is full of life and she uses it to combat a designated reality. She sees things vividly, they pass through her being, overcoming the established facts and evidence and she uses what comes into her path of vision as motifs, themes or details. True to life, she penetrates it profoundly, with all the consequences, with all the pain this entails. She searches for a state of grace where concentration, catharsis, bravery and talent, her artist’s tools, are victorious in our shared war.
La fuerza del trabajo | 2015 | Óleo, acrílico y collage sobre papel | 70 x 100 cm
The last few years of Idoia Montón’s work was developed in La Escocesa Art Centre in Poble Nou, a post-Industrial neighbourhood of Barcelona, space which was established 20 years ago by the artists themselves and which has been the birthplace of ideology, liberty and revolution. Resistance and internal processes have been its hallmarks. This wonderful, inspiring architectural structure has the stamp of Idoia on one of its entrances where again she depicts the city, a stage which allows the artist to show us the resistance we need to inhabit it. New symmetries, faces hidden in the urban reality and dizzying compositions are revealed again to help us understand our wounds and to cure them.
| 2016 | Óleo, acrílico y collage sobre papel | 89 x 65 cm
The necessity of the emotions to structure content is paramount. Idoia’s work, situated outside of the hegemonic artistic tendencies of recent years, shows the potency of the emotional when it’s used as a tool of knowledge and combat. There is an urgent need to deal with our pain since the system of anaesthesia in which we are embedded does not permit us to connect with ourselves, it leaves us less revolutionary and less adept at being truly alive. Idoia’s work offers us that option. In interpreting it we are taking the route of penetrating reality and time itself, the here and now which contains the moment of the work’s creation and which is, in this case, the same here and now as when you have a work in front of you. I look at the works of Idoia and learn from her intensity, her profoundness and her impulsivity, those values which move us to change things.
| 2016 | Óleo, acrílico y collage sobre papel | 100 x 69 cm
Our strength and inspiration are repressed by the bureaucratic art systems we belong to. Programs and activities fill our empty lives, a void that stands between our ideas and our reality, a veritable smokescreen hiding our feelings. Idoia Montón’s work appeals to our internal contact, to the necessary profoundness, to the emotions necessary for being alive, to the concentration necessary to get to the bottom of that what we feel, trusting it. Our feelings don’t lie; through the language of art, a tool in the struggle for survival, we can transgress the contradictions of our present.
Carmen de Ayora 2018
Solar | 2016 | Óleo, acrílico y collage sobre papel | 75 x 100 cm