KCR Spring 2024 Magazine FINAL v2 Lower res - Flipbook - Page 18
Cristina de Miguel:
Dissolving
29 February 3 6 April 2024
Almine Rech London
Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House, London W1K 3JH
Cristina de Miguel is an expressive 昀gurative artist who sees painting as an extension of the body. Her approach to painting is emotional, thinking
in formal terms but balancing it out with a let-go attitude. She insists on the materiality of the painting by fragmenting the 昀gure, so the 昀gure is not
the central point of the painting but the act of painting in itself. The iconography in her work alludes to action, velocity, and the possibilities of the
body - bodies that melt physically, in the same way paint drips and melts too.
Her creative process is intuitive and immediate; she avoids pre-planning, preferring to begin in front of the blank canvas. De Miguel9s brushwork is
apparent everywhere in her compositions, as are the marks of her 昀ngers and, sometimes, bits of studio detritus4evidence, in her eyes, of painting
as a direct extension of the artist herself.
Fun and friendly as her art is, it is also uncanny, just di昀erent enough to perplex. It is accessible, but also possessing of a certain e昀ect and a昀ect
that demands some explanation as to a how and why. To call it a trick or technique seems a poor choice of words because it implies a matter of control or determination too elusive for such a volatile medium, but the essence of her process is embodied in the 昀uidity of surface and form, a way of
mixing paint, gesture and a halfdrowning dose of water as she goes along. Cristina de Miguel9s highly emotive free-form distortions of the body o昀er
their own dramatic anatomical interventions. It is somewhere between swimming and dissolving, the kind of bath that takes you out of yourself, the
deceit of 昀owing water that seems calm, orderly or even still under the physics of force but is improvisatory and incalculable, a dynamic that can just
as easily pull you under and sweep you away.
www.alminerech.com
Image:
Cristina de Miguel, Viento de Mar, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 152.4 cm / 72 x 60 in © Cristina de Miguel / Courtesy of the Artist and
Almine Rech
KENSINGTON & CHELSEA REVIEW
PAGE 18