Artist: Maíllo
Dates: November 14th 2015 to January 15th 2016

Ponce + Robles is proud to present the last works of Maíllo.

During Maíllo’s brief but intense career we have witnessed throughout his thematic projects (Slight Flow 2012, Detroit 2013, Raw Approach 2015) how this artist has been fitting all and any pieces coming from sources of extremely varied inspiration (comics, music, TV series… ) by using the gap between higher and lower culture, and by overlapping techniques, styles, and themes. All this seems to work for the artist as a sort of food for thought that keeps his head busy and constantly reflecting about the world around him, while also serving the viewer as mapping of the present times like a great conceptual map where networks and references to cutting-edge culture appear interacting with each another.

In this new exhibition the artist has already created his own system, Maíllo does not think or compare. The freedom of being a painter and his fondness for painting lead Maíllo to an endless flowing that clears his mind. He fills canvases with colour, momentum, strokes, rhythm and messages alluding to internal stimuli and other elements that the artist finds around: boots, hands, feet, bonfires, glasses, locks, cups, etc. However within this transmutation -empty/full- the artist has time to mix some elements that are more figurative, closer to the cartoon or graffiti language, with a set of personal marks and gestures that are far from any clear reference.

Faraway from any narrative, in this exhibition this young painter increases his own hermetic symbology by generating a personal language and systematizing a conceptual approach based on notebook sketches and inputs from the digital world, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, or the Safari browser from which the artist extracts screenshots with his iPhone compulsively as preliminary study. This is an intermediate step in the realization of his paintings and which actually facilitates the spontaneity of his subconscious – just as Surrealists and abstract Expressionists did – stopping it from being inhibited in the delirium, like an unanswered phrase which reports what is going on today.

Biography:

Maíllo (Madrid 1985) graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid.
Represented by the Ponce + Robles Gallery, in April 2015 he opened the exhibition “Raw Approach” at the Art Center of Alcobendas Madrid, his first solo exhibition in a museum.
Last summer he enjoyed a residence at Addaya Centre d’Art Contemporani where he opened “Maíllo in Mallorca” curated by Virginia Torrente, his fourth solo exhibition after “Detroit” a two-part project which he opened in his parent gallery and in Arco’14 .
Maíllo has been reviewed in many a publishing, we can underline the following books “2014 / Before leaving. 40 ideas on painting” , by David Barro, and “Spanish Contemporary Art 1992-2013” by Rafael Doctor Roncero. Is his brief but intense journey, and with some more solo exhibitions like “Mighty Buckaroo ” in the Gallery Javier Silva, and “Slight Flow” in the Gallery Jose Robles, Maíllo realizes what is happening out there through painting and its possibilities, understanding painting as a multiforme means.
His work has been exhibited in collective events like Festival Mulafest, Open Studios, the urban art project Betart Calvia, Festival Cultura Inquieta, the College of Spain in Paris and in the Hall of Young Art of the Community of Madrid, and was selected in the XXIIIth edition of Circuitos.
He took part in Arco’13 with the project “Splitting references, embodying strokes” and in the exhibition “Struggling with the Dam Painting!” curated by Juan Ugalde at the ICO Collections Museum in Madrid. He is part of the Transit platform and the file of creators in Matadero. His work is be found in different private and public collections in Spain, France, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Switzerland and Germany.