Monica Dixon, much more than painted cottages

A series with aura: her interior architectures, magically orchestrated with lights and shadows.

Monica Dixon. Somewhere... Nowhere.
Guillermina Caicoya Art Projects. Oviedo

La Nueva España, diciembre 2017
Rubén Suarez

 

 

Born in the United States (New Jersey, 1971), Monica Dixon Gutiérrez de Terán is from Oviedo, Asturias, where she lives and works and where she has been developing an artistic career in which it is worth mentioning, at least considering the last few years, her remarkable activity in terms of participation in painting competitions, both those held in Asturias and in other parts of Spain in which she has been awarded or selected.
Of those participations, and perhaps of some individual exhibitions, which have been less frequent and relevant than those, I had the memory of a very recurring pictorial motif: peculiar and attractive little houses that appeared as lost, somehow lost, in the absolute solitude of enormous space surfaces, sky and earth without human or plant presence. Archetypical images of some rural American architecture and pictorially well treated, had and have, because they are also exhibited in the exhibition of now, its charm, and in the perception as a motif a certain surreal-infantile air by which they have been seen as part of a dream sequence. However, this ambiguity of the unknowable does not acquire a real personality of' strangeness', that is, an ambiguity of the unknowable that hangs unsettling over them, exposed to invisible forces, as can happen for example with the Hopperian houses, so often Gothic  or metaphysical, that have been mentioned in this regard.

If I have gone into the uncertainty principle, that mysterious attraction, it is because Monica Dixon achieves something very similar, even if that is the least of her merits, with another series of pieces that, in a process of abrupt reinvention and admirable incoherence, also feature in this exhibition. Beautiful paintings, and with aura, these interior architectures magically orchestrated with lights and shadows. Perhaps unconsciously, the artist slips through values that are characteristic of the best black-and-white photography, the appearance of its literal veracity and its aesthetics, and takes them back to painting, which then follows the inspiration of the Italian metaphysical school that has always seen symbolic revelations in the shapes of geometry, so that between the lesson of photography, architectural figuration and geometric abstraction,  Monica Dixon performs this very interesting artistic experience, which I hope has been as satisfying as its contemplation for the spectator, who is always grateful to see such reflective and well painted paintings that leave behind the first look a permanent aesthetic aftertaste. Best thing you've seen lately.