Mònica Subidé
good morning
March 12 - April 16, 2022
Nino Mier Gallery | Brussels
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce good morning, a solo exhibition of paintings by Barcelona-based artist Mònica Subidé. Composed of both works on canvas and on paper, good morning offers stylistic parallels between portraiture and still life painting presented within Subidé’s peacefully desaturated, shallow interiors. The exhibition will be on view at our Brussels location from March 12 - April 16, 2022.
Mònica Subidé constructs enigmatic paintings on linen and paper that incorporate oil paint, pencil, and sometimes minimal collaged motifs. The artist studied drawing at the Centre d’Art, Massana, Barcelona, and has a longstanding affinity for the medium. She keeps a personal archive of her pencil on paper works, which later re-appear in her paintings. The collaged materials that appear throughout good morning hail from various regions, from Japanese Kitakata paper to German Hahnemühle paper. Subidé even handmakes paper at a mill, the products of which appear in bamboo leaf and claveles. Her collaged paper is oftentimes years old—even twenty-nine years old, in the case of the white paper that appears in the little flower is on top—exemplifying her holistic commitment to the process and the products of her practice.
Subidé’s compositional approach favors painterly surfaces over verisimilitude, using collage as a tool to represent the collapsed depth of dreams. In Good Morning, for instance, a woman stretches her left arm across her body to delicately touch a flower growing beside her. The plant is made up of three flowers blooming from a long, sturdy stem. Some flower petals are painted directly onto the canvas, while others feature an intermediary layer of collaged paper. This issues in a warped perspective, one that does not offer any real spatial recession.
A loose approach to figuration undergirds Subidé’s exploration of the lyrical correspondences between human and plant forms. From her lush handling of paint to her unfinished lines and cubist approach to shading, Subidé’s hybrid approach to abstraction and representation recalls the work of modernists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Egon Schiele, Ernst Kirchner, and the late work of Pablo Picasso, as well as the work of late surrealists such as Louise Bourgeois. But her surfaces cultivate a uniquely distanced, quiet warmth, one located in her figures’ magnetic yet reticent faces, and in the limb-like floral arrangements that complement them.
When writing about her approach to collage, Subidé has stated: “It’s a game of dolls. For me, collage is a disguise.” The presence of disguise resonates not only with the materiality of her works, but also within her subjects. The portraits in good morning feature figures that vary in posture, but that all have the same, obscure expression: a mouth positioned in the midway point between smile and grimace, eyes that look just to the side of the viewer, a stiff neck that signals the utmost reserve. She depicts emotional disguise most pronouncedly in the painting Gema’s secret, which portrays a sphinxlike woman holding a bouquet but withholding genuine expression.
The thematic of disguise in good morning extends further, incorporating Subidé’s approach to still life. Subidé has stated that she wants even her inanimate objects to seem like they could “get up and walk away.” In Pink and green daisies, for example, two tall flowers grow out from their pot with gusto, swaying to one side with arm-like branches extending horizontally beside them. In some instances, her flowers seem like ciphers for her human subjects, ordained with a mobility that her women and men seem to lack. In Lady with long blue dress, a woman covers her mouth—the most common vehicle for self-expression— with a vivid, cerulean flower. In other instances, Subidé’s flowers mimic the motion of her human bodies, like the curves of the figures’ arms in One flower down and Gema’s secret, or of the figure’s hands in Touching fingertips. In good morning, Subidé’s plants betray the mystery of their human counterparts.
The most anthropomorphic flowers in good morning appear in the works Flower women head pink and Flower women head blue. In each painting, a woman reclines on a chestnut chair, her legs foreshortened in the lower half of the picture plane. Moving up her body, her torso becomes lined like the veins of a stem, her hands turn into blooming flowers, and her face is framed with petals. After regarding these drawings, it is tempting return to her other still life paintings and see the human body within plant parts—hands in Two tulips with stripes, eyes or breasts in Floral winter one pear and two lemons, a face with arms outstretched in The two Christmas trees. If Dutch still life paintings reminded viewers of their own mortality, Subidé’s still lives remind us of the duration of life beyond our own selves. It is easy to imagine her flowers emitting little screams when cut.
Mònica Subidé (b.1974, Barcelona, Spain; lives and works in Barcelona) studied at the Centre d’Art Massana, Barcelona. She has exhibited with Yiri Arts, Taipei; Galeria Contrast, Barcelona, Spain; Bea Villamarin, Gijón, Spain; and Soy Capitán Gallery, Berlin, Germany.