For some time now Jon Barredo (Bilbao 1950) has stablished a unique relationship with the sea. When crossing its banks, he often rescues some of the organic materials that waves return to sand and inspired by a sort of affection, creates for them an environment where to relocate and find a new identity.
His long research on the pictorial space, the geometry that encloses and shapes it, and the creative possibilities provided by outlines and colour, acquire a further signification when housing these elements of a marine nature. Seaweed like ocle, fragments of logs and twigs, or nautical woods licked by the sea project their shadow on the invented surface of a two-dimensional artificial space where lyric arises.
Isabel Bilbao –Text for “Ella al Sol”
IN TRANSIT - Jon Barredo
Fifteen years ago I presented my last solo exhibition. Since then I have not stopped painting and I’ve taken part in numerous group shows and events.
At that time I wanted to confront the idea of the "common place of uprooting" on the surface of the painting. A concept of civic ethics in which I was working, in an attempt to understand the inclusion of a stranger in a given context, as using the pictorial plane as a space of experimentation would allow me to assess a possible parallelism with the social context and pose a possible dialogue between them.
Concerned about the speech, I had the feeling that I was neglecting values proper to painting. For this reason I now intend to carry out an exercise of plastic integration in which the shadows of the objects found and placed in the painting continue to have importance in the process and the colour, as a unifying element, acquires a greater prominence.
In this exhibition I show that route, a before and a now in my work, I am in transit.

Exhibition Opening : Saturday 4th May from 18:30 To 20:30 hours

mpefm SPAIN art press release