The works of Paula Otegui are real battlefields. Not only because, literally, the artist often represents disputed human groups, submerged in more or less peaceful, more or less chaotic plastic territories, but mainly because other no less evident struggles take place in them: the eternal contest between the graphic and the pictorial, between the line and the stain, between the line and the color.
As a sounding board, Otegui spreads the tensions. With an impeccable technique, it superimposes figurative, abstract, geometric patterns, stains, creating a complex visual plot where the gaze becomes abysmal. For this, he uses a whole series of plastic resources, contained by a strict composition that avoids any dispersion.
The stylistic and technical solvency with which Paula Otegui supports her fascinating settings is remarkable; the expansive balance that she amalgamates them seems natural, without dissonant accents or inordinate resources. A certain flora, an unlikely geography, a rare figuration have grown on the canvas with the same opulent simplicity with which nature imposes its infinite forms on the real world. In this current, the iconographic factors of a botany that are closer to the invention of the marvelous tale than to scientific nomenclature, and of a landscape that is paradisiacal longing and arbitrary germination rather than referential
resonance, are interwoven and camouflaged. Here and there strange characters can be glimpsed, joyfully imbricated in these gardens of sketching delights, humidified by an atmosphere of hypnotic irradiation.
When we let ourselves be impregnated by it, we perceive that Otegui connects sensually, and offers us an equivalent intimacy according to the hedonism of doing and looking, with a secret complicit perversity. Candid little houses, streams and swamps that come out of the sweet fever experienced by some dazzled passerby while crossing her imaginary jungle utopia, coexist with perfectly extemporaneous spots and brushstrokes in the excess of it, to redefine the structural intonation of the entire composition.
When the optic of the piece is inverted, the background is then black, with the motifs cut out in a milky white and almost primordial, with a bony luminosity, like plankton, generating renewed restlessness in a scene that is as fabulous as it is spectral. At the same time, color, concentrated especially in those rhythmic circles and lunar spheres, also operates as a counterpoint factor and chromatic alteration, productively disturbing the tonal quality of the whole. With one foot on the most virtuous manga tradition, and a certain relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist universe, plus a well understood and better resolved decorativeness and ornamentation, the artist constructs her anomalous greenhouse, fertile in foliage of uncertain origin, in clouds. , slime, specters, pelambres and branches, installed in a perpetual movement of tension and backwater, sinuosity and strictness, unleashed graphics and detailed precision, invariably fed by a dark and intoxicating sage.
