During April and May the George Adams Gallery will present new paintings by Spanish artist Lino Lago. The exhibition includes nine paintings all featuring carefully rendered, realistic images over which Lago has added visually intrusive text or splashes of color. While seemingly casual, each of these violations of the paintings’ integrity is intended to draw attention to the way we look and think about art and beauty.
For example, the artist’s most naturalistic work in the exhibition, “Car Lights,” is a large-scale diptych of the view of car headlights and taillights as seen through a rain-spattered windshield, the effect being at once hyper-realistic and abstract. In “Your Ad Here,” Lago has recreated Giorgione’s “Sleeping Venus,“ 1510 (Gemaldegalerie, Dresden) only to cover half of the middle section with a large blue square of paint on which appears the painting’s title and the Gemaldegalerie’s telephone number.
Lino Lago was born in Spain in 1973, and graduated from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. Lago has exhibited regularly in Spain and in group shows in Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Havana, Madrid, Shanghai, and Vilnius, Lithuania. This is the artist’s first one-man show in the United States.
1.
Interior with Yellow Paint, 2011
oil on canvas
72 x 72 inches
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2.
Your Ad Here, 2011
oil on canvas
46 x 78 inches
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3.
Flower Painting, 2011
oil on canvas
57 x 39 ½ inches
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4.
Woman with Yellow Paint, 2011
oil on canvas
48 x 48 inches
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5.
Car Lights, 2011
oil on canvas
72 x 72 inches (each)
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6.
This area is not so important, 2011
oil on canvas
48 x 32 inches
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7.
Girl with Blue Paint, 2010
oil on canvas
72 x 58 inches
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8. (West window)
Boy with Paint, 2010
oil on canvas
69 1/4 x 48 inches
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9. (East window)
Parallel I, 2011
oil on canvas
24 x 16 inches
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