supertacular » La profundidad de la piel

Madame d’Haussonville (Ingres) -Â 70x50cm

“Beauty is only skin deep”. Ãngeles Agrela has based the title of her latest exhibition on this phrase, normally used to refer to the superficiality of beauty.Â However, she only takes the second part of the sentence, so that her title neither rejects nor affirms the claim.Â In fact the exhibition itself does little to reveal her intentions. Rather, her installation dives into a journey that travels along the fine line from the thin painted surface to the depth of our emotions to the suspicion of our futility.

Duques de Urbino (Piero della Francesca)- 100x70cm

Wilhelmine Begas, Mujer del artista (Karl Begas)- 100x100cm

La Joven de la Perla (Vermmer) – 100x100cm

Skin deep locates us in a poetic territory that is far from the superficial, a territory that takes shape from images that belong to our collective cultural memory. In fact, the exhibition is also a collection of real paintings. Reinterpretations, croppings and novel approaches to well-known works of great masters from the Renaissance to the XIX century.Â Piero della Francesca, Robert Campin, Hans Holbein, Vermeer, VelÃ¡zquez and Ingres.Â More specifically portraits.Â Agrela has literally ripped the skin from the people who, so faithfully portrayed, watch us from the walls revealing what it (the painting?) hides; detailed maps of their muscles, veins, nerves and bones like lessons in anatomy.

La Gran Odalisca (Ingres) – 100x100cm

Retrato de joven (Bottichelli) – 60x50cm

Isabel de Portugal (Roger van-der Weyden) – 60x50cm

Detalle del descendimiento (Roger van der Weyden) – 60x50cm

It is very easy to see photographs of dissections, or macabre images that show starkly the truth of what lies behind the skin, even we have seen very media exhibitions with real human corpses preserved with new techniques and carefully dissected.Â The pictures are there… for anyone who wants to see them.Â Appellant is also the procedure for the appropriation of images to digitally manipulate and serve them later reproduced Â by the most diverse ways.

AgrelaÂ´s choice to paint it is not accidental. The reproduction and reinterpretation of well-known portraits, executed in traditional painting techniques, shapes the poetic exercise that is SkinÂ Deep. Recently, Agrela has worked with large drawings depicting sheets from anatomy books, introducing overlappingÂ foreign elementsÂ thatÂ produce perplexing associations of images.Â Her reflection onÂ vanitas was already present in her work, and is perhaps more evident here in her transposition of the subject from the more impersonal anatomical drawingÂ to portraits that the skin of the painting provides, and on which we, as observers, project ourselves vainly.Â And maybe it really is sin of vanity when we observe a work of art, given that the way we project ourselves on the images distracts us from what really matters.

Susana de Bourbon Beaujeu (Maestro de Moulins) – 60x50cm

Retrato de una joven (Bottichelli)Â – 100x50cm

Retrato de Jane Seimour (Hans Holbein el joven) – 60x50cm

Reina Mariana de Austria (Velazquez) – 70x100cm

The portrait, which reached its zenith of perfection by the great masters, especially since the Renaissance, locates us as individuals before a mirror in which we recognize ourselves in some way, facing the uncomfortable truth of what lies benath the raised skinÂ in the case of AgrelaÂ´s interpretations.Â And let us not forget that the illusory deception of painting is present in this equation.Â Does the thin surface of the painting represent the entire depth of the beauty of the work of art?Â As observers we allow ourselves to be subjugated (and even mislead) by the tiny effects of color and light in the different layers of paint, as we draw close with joy.Â And we project our way of thinking and our own image onto the interpretation that we make of these events, with all our vanity, losing sight of what really is important. And we also can see ourself devoid of skin, veins, nerves and muscles exposed, because in the double thinness that characterizes both human skin and the painted surface, ÃngelesÂ AgrelaÂ´s installation plays.