Form and Formlessness

Amanita presents Felicidad Moreno: Form and Formlessness, a presentation of new paintings and works on paper by Spanish artist Felicidad Moreno. This is Felicidad’s first exhibition with the gallery and her first solo show in the US.

Over the years Moreno has mined a painterly language of overlapping lines, spray paint, melting enamel drips and gestural curved marks, which become beams of light and shadows, creating abstractions spiraling into the unknown. Her work creates a parallel reality that allows the imagination to float in space and, simultaneously, experience a molecular view of the world.

The new works on view present a reoccurring tension between a gestural background that materializes through horizontal, curved lines, and a central form that bleeds and disintegrates as it expands across the picture plane in different directions. Similar to many periods from the past, Moreno’s pictorial style revolves around light and movement. A palimpsest of gestures, actions, materials, and different methods of paint application bring her vibrant imagery to life. The artist begins with spray paint - because of the medium’s inherent immediacy - in order to loosely structure space and activate her process’s following actions. Horizontal lines create a sense of landscape while their curved counterparts imbue her compositions with depth of field. The central image, or stain, superimposed on this initial layer appears in a highly liquid undetermined state. The stains arrive to their final form through guided accidents as Moreno by balancing the canvas from different angles flat on the ground. Ultimately, drawing is an essential aspect of her practice as the artist adds black, white, red and yellow pigments to the wet stains, creating intricate waves of color that interact with the form and disrupt it.

In the same way, Moreno's approach is based on a language embodied by dualities: the organic and the geometric, lines and curves, chance and control. However, in this series it is not the dualities that define her language, but the intermediate stage between them. As the artist states: "In the act of painting there is a series of tensions between freedom and the control that is exercised, between what appears and what is hidden, between reality and perception”. The essence of her work is not so much in what we can observe at a formal level, but in what we cannot see. These are paintings and drawings born out of the eternal tension between the corporeal and the ethereal, between form and formlessness.

Felicidad Moreno’s (Madrid, 1959) work has been the subject of important institutional solo exhibitions, such as Hipnótico (2006) at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Espacio Dinámico (2006) at the Centro de Arte Caja Burgos, Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander (2007) and Sala Amós Salvador de La Rioja (2004), and in group exhibitions such as Collecio d'art Contemporani at Caixa Forum (2002) and Los Cinéticos at Museo Nacional Centro Reina Sofía (2007).