Ismael Lagares

Lagares is one of the Spanish artists of his generation with the greatest national and international outreach. Most of his production is made up of canvases, which can reach imposing sizes, where he applies dense oil impastos and hand-made ceramics covering the surface in striking three-dimensional compositions. He combines techniques such as collage or graffiti with Informalist inspirations in a vigorous and energetic creative process that never fails to result in harmonious compositions with an ingenious balance of their own.

Color and matter function as a bridge between the senses of the viewer and the inner world of the artist. Through an abstraction with a strong expressionist character, each work produces a strong visual impact on whoever observes it. He plays with the density and pigments, contrasting them with each other and the background, sometimes left to its pure white linen, and thus turning the support into pictorial material as well. His ever-changing palette takes us from luminous landscapes of intense reds, yellows, blues and oranges all the way to his Ocher Period or his Monochromatic Paintings, in which a single color dominates both the matter and the canvas. The thick segments of paint are more subtle but more important than ever and they incorporate small brushstrokes of color that, like flashes of light, emphasize the sculptorical quality of these artworks and reward an attentive gaze.