Exactly one decade ago, just before winning the Vila Casas Foundation Painting Prize (2013), the artist Lídia Masllorens, proving to be light years away from any form of shrill egocentrism, defined herself as follows: "I was born in Caldes de Malavella in 1967. I currently live in Cassà de la Selva and work as an art teacher at the high school in Llagostera. I earned a Fine Arts Degree in 1991. I have expanded my painting studies with photography, engraving, stone sculptures, and large format sculptures."
However, these comments came just before winning this life-changing award: "I don't know if people are aware of the importance of certain artistic awards, such as the Vila Casas Foundation Painting Prize, but it changed my life. Immediately afterwards, gallery owner Miquel Alzueta came and started selling my work. This made it definitively possible for me to become a professional painter." And let no one be mistaken: Lídia Masllorens had always painted. The radical change was the possibility of having a work space adapted to her needs (quite large, in fact) and the time and exclusive dedication that would clearly be immediately reflected in her works.
In one of her essays on photography, the great Rosalind Krauss pointed out a characteristic of self-portraits that often goes unnoticed: the artist, for obvious reasons, is never shown working. What the artists represent, in reality, is their "observation," a gaze that may seem deep and scrutinizing to us but that remains perfectly static. For this reason, Krauss insisted, the images that Hans Namuth obtained around 1950 in Jackson Pollock's studio were so important and revealing at the time. As Krauss explained: "For the first time, the artist showed himself engaging in his famous method, splattering and splashing paint over the canvas lying on his workshop floor in a ballet of rapid gestures that seemed to erase all possibility of analysis or reflection." Action Painting had just been born, a term inextricably connected to a new conception of the pictorial surface that, to be clear, became something similar to a stage, a boxing ring, an unpredictable battlefield set to reach the limit.
The artist dances, fights, expands, and takes action. Lídia Masllorens has no doubts: "When I'm working it's the most important moment for me." Painting and action mesh together to the point that the body paints, not the mind: "Brushes have not been enough for me for a long time now. When I work, I need to use my entire body and tools that give me leverage. They may seem unsophisticated, but they are very effective instruments when it comes to capturing gestures. That's why I paint horizontally. I need to melt into the work while I do it, become a part of it." This is her essence: Masllorens does not live "from" or "for" painting, but lives "in" painting.
Perhaps this is why portraits are of such interest to Masllorens: because they are the only part of the body that is always shown bare. Theorists such as French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy dedicated entire essays to the issue of the face. According to him, the gaze from a portrait cannot be reduced to isolated eyes looking from the rest of the figure, but it is the figure as a whole that makes the gaze. It is a form of autonomy that is only produced in portrait paintings.
Talking to Lídia Masllorens brings you closer to the craft of painting. Conversing with her makes you appreciate elements that have now lost credibility, for whatever reason. First, the plasticity that Rothko spoke of, but also the different forms of extended temporality (this era of painting was vastly different from the digital vortex), intuition, chance and accident, or, in short, all the images of extreme fragility that end up defining us as calligraphic markings, faces only hinted at, of a forcefulness as accentuated as it is ephemeral. The echo of the battle that Masllorens wages in each work is what reaches us through all of her pieces.
