January 20th - March 20th 2022

54, RUE JACOB

75006 - PARIS

Lino Lago - Fake abstract red on A. Roslin - 2022, H 70 x 60cm

Lino Lago - Fake abstract blue on Ingres - 2022, H 150 x 128cm

About the artist :

Lino Lago was born in 1973 in Redondela, in Spain. He lives in Galapagar in Spain. He graduated from the Fine Arts University of Madrid Complutense University, painting section.

Lino Lago has always been a painter. From an early age, he dedicates him to his vocation. When he returns to university, he will be deeply shocked by the idea of «death» of painting, which has spread over twenty years in contemporary art. Since then he has been tirelessly questioning his status as an artist and his production.

Since 2015, the artist expresses his questions through two séries. The first «Fake Abstract» confronts the minimalism of a monochrome with a detail of a masterpiece. The overlay is unveiled by the trace of a child’s finger that would have erased the second layer of paint, revealing a look, a mouth. With a humor that borders on the absurd, Lino puts in tension the concept of beauty, in the aesthetic sense of the term. On the one hand, the canon sought by the classic masters takes hold of the woman and brush it in de- tails until splendor, on the other the modernism of the 1970s seeks beauty in an «art that excludes the superfluous «(Carl André). This juxtaposition creates a vibratory effect and raises the question of what beauty is today.

The second series, Pintura sobre Pintura, leaves more room for the mas- ter canvas. The viewer must move away to understand the superposition. Painted in negative, a dog’s head holds in its fangs the classic beauty. The beast eats the beautiful.

Lino Lago seems to be accompanied by the works of the old masters to understand and apprehend contemporary issues. As if asking us to reconsider them, he paints them through a keyhole, creating a whole new attraction. This fragmentation of the portrait opens our eyes to multiple interpretations.

Lino Lago - Fake abstract pink on Ingres - 2022, H 82 x 100cm

View of the exhibition, 'Fausse abstraction ', Lino Lago's solo show

The paintings in the Fake Abstract series come from an experience of the material (like all ideas). One painting leads you to another painting, and the beginning of Fake Abstract lies in the bursts of color and interventions that I practiced in previous series on realistic images.

For me, the most interesting feature of human reality is the perpetual clash between novelty and heritage. Something similar to what we call the «generation conflict», but on a larger scale.

I tried to represent in one piece of canvas the struggle of contradictory ideas that we have in our society. This is called dialectical philosophy, which in real life means something like «Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about».

Everyone has an opinion, so there is no way to avoid a certain degree of stress in the way history develops in a society itself or against other societies and cultures. Moreover, the idea of Fake News is perhaps only one aspect of this struggle between conflicting interests.

Applying these ideas to painting, I come to the conclusion that a single style cannot represent the confusion of our reality. So I paint a single picture as if two different people were working on it. Yes, this is a degree of schizophrenia, but it is found everywhere.

So we get this:

In one part of the painting I follow a classical technique by copying in oil, portraits presenting the academic idea of beauty, traditionally represented by a female image. There is no need to say it... this concept of beauty is the most ques- tioned, forgotten in fact by the academy of contemporary art.

The rest of the image is a brilliant, flat and nihilistic abstraction that lets us see, through a simple line, a small fragment of a disappearing reality.

Both styles are... pure decoration, pure Academy, pure Fake.

Lino Lago.