Group Exhibition: Recent Paintings by Regina Saura & Manel Anoro

August 4 – September 5, 2016
Meet the Artist | Regina Saura | Thursday | August 4 | 5:30 – 7:30 PM

San Francisco, CA- Caldwell Snyder is pleased to present a group exhibition of recent paintings by two celebrated Spanish artists’, Regina Saura and Manel Anoro. Natives of the sun-drenched Catalunya, Saura and Anoro express their profound affection for the shimmering Mediterranean landscape through their vivid palettes and bold, expressive lines. Working in mixed media, Saura steeps her paintings with personal narratives, elevating them beyond everyday landscapes to portals to her imagination. Anoro, painting in the fauvist manner, instead gives in to the natural curves of the landscape and indulges in its splendor. Together, they offer dazzling vignettes of a region brimming with vitality.
Regina’s loose, whimsical brushstrokes and bold washes of color lend her paintings an instinctual, child-like spontaneity that belies her sophisticated command of composition, balance, shape, coloration, and line. Singing with energy and vibrancy, her paintings capture the wonder and magic of life. As with flowers and trees, in her use of newspaper scraps, Regina introduces pieces of her own daily life into her work. The touch of newsprint that comprises the houses of her native countryside–relate the paintings to a specific time and place, and serve as a reminder, no matter where they might be seen around the globe, of home. Refreshing in their quirky originality, yet profoundly symbolic, Regina’s paintings capture the brilliance and exuberance of the human spirit.
It’s impossible to look at Anoro’s images and not be reminded of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin, both of whom famously reveled in vivid color and light and beguiled viewers with their curvaceous, flowing lines and forms. “Cutting into color,” Matisse once said, “reminds me of the sculptor’s direct carving.” This idea of ‘sculpting’ an image from pure color resonates with Anoro’s paintings, in which entire landscapes are re-envisioned as worlds built from patches of pigment–vermillion, turquoise, saffron, emerald, cream, azure. Variations in light are boldly conveyed with strokes of contrasting, even opposite colors-violet on yellow, red on green. But most of all, sparkling light animates the whole picture, infusing buildings, figures, trees, and everything in sight with the dynamic rhythms that have become Anoro’s signature.
Looking at Anoro’s paintings, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the artist describes his youth as a “Technicolor movie,” flush with colors and patterns from the fabric his dressmaker mother constantly brought into the house and subsequently draped on her customers. Anoro was destined to become an artist, drawing with passion from an early age and always fascinated with the beauty of his surroundings, particularly in the summer, when the “strong June light” permeated the landscape. However, not until later in life did he fully turn to painting. Once he stepped back into the realm of art, he says, “It felt as though I had been on a long journey at the end of which you find what you had already known: old forgotten friends. Nothing seemed strange in the world of painting. … It bought back the essence of shapes and colors of my childhood.”
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“Recent Paintings by Regina Saura & Manel Anoro” – August 2016 | Caldwell Snyder Gallery 341 Sutter Street | San Francisco, California 94108 | For more information, high-resolution images or a press kit, please contact Christina | christina@https://www.sfada.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PAR170305w_Eternity78_43x43-1.jpg.com or call 415.392.2299 www.https://www.sfada.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PAR170305w_Eternity78_43x43-1.jpg.com