The Brooklyn Rail

Soledad Sevilla’s retrospective at the Reina Sofia Museum opens with a series of abstract paintings and drawings under the collective title “Mondrian” (1973). A self-explanatory nod to the Dutch Neoplasticist and his project to, in Yve-Alain Bois’s memorable summation, eradicate the figure, the center, and the discreet ground from the established compositional order, the works do not so much resemble any Mondrian painting in particular (although they come closest to the New York period) as adopt his modular approach to leave the viewer confronted by the grid—in this case, an oblique polygonal one—as pure shape. For his part, and despite his best efforts, Mondrian would in time arrive to see that “man’s eye is not yet free from his body. Vision is inherently bound to our normal position.” Emerging from the peer group of Spanish artists whose work was defined by its adherence to the dogma of geometric abstraction (politically, as much as aesthetically driven by Spain’s contemporaneous tumultuous political climate and its emerging orthodoxy of new figuration), Sevilla metabolized this lesson early on: the entirety of her oeuvre is threaded through with conviction of the inherent inseparability of phenomenology and pareidolia from the myth of “pure” abstraction. The inescapable formal context (explicitly acknowledged by Sevilla herself in the work included in her exhibition Variaciones de una línea, 1966–1986) here is that of the 1960s minimalist invention of the line as pictorial element fully stripped of any suggestion of either expressionistic (as in Abstract Expressionism’s trade of the narrative space for the implication of the purity of an artist’s interiority) or illusionistic (as in classical art’s “window” model) intention, leaving the painting’s support untransformed by any suspicion of underlying metaphor. (I am indebted for this insight to Rosalind Krauss’s canonical essay in Line as Language: Six Artists Draw.) That project, too, reached its logical conclusion in the acknowledgment of phenomenology’s undeniability—with Krauss’s “‘Specific’ Objects,” Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, et alia.

Sevilla’s work consistently leans toward the gigantic: a feature that signposts its insistence on ambient corporal immersiveness, something that becomes a physical reality in the artist’s many installation works, pivotal to her overall oeuvre, yet unfortunately largely absent from the show. Sin Titulo (1977), a hypnotizing ten-by-twenty-foot field of rich, gem-like, eggplant purple, overlaid by a slanted grid and animated by repeating stripes of gold, salmon pink, and Hermès orange, is exemplary of her typical modus operandi. The edge-lapping lines of its grid outline point to the canvas being merely an extract of an infinitely larger whole, while its geometrical composition denies any possibility of illusionistic depth. As evident throughout the early painted pieces, Sevilla’s stratagem is to optically deny the viewer a window of distinguishing the “protagonist” subject from the ground. At the same time, in a clever allusion to the paradigm established by the classical painting, where said “ground” is presented under a clear expectation and with explicit indication of its wider extension beyond the small parcel depicted within the picture frame, Sevilla employs the same pictorial trick for the benefit of abstraction. In her case, the spatial extension points toward the absence of any focal element that couldn’t also be located outside the canvas.

In the following gallery, “Las Meninas” (1981–83), a room-spanning series of colorful, tightly gridded fields, on first encounter visually suggests woven fabric through the volumetric illusion and the inventive color interactions of the spellbindingly dense placement of line. Diego Velázquez’s original Las Meninas (1656) is, in Hubert Damisch’s penetrating formulation, a painting where “the spectator is linked to representation taking place within the scene by a network of lines leading from the painting, traversing the viewer, and apparently converging on a point which Foucault qualifies as ‘uncertain,’ because invisible.” Sevilla thus literalizes this description, freeing the lines from the encumberment of figuration and historical narrative. To that effect, if one were to be less generous, the paintings can, like much of the artist’s work, verge on op art—an influence, perhaps, of Eusebio Sempere, the most op art aligned of the new Spanish cohort of the time of Sevilla’s artistic maturation. Whatever the case, this pictorial property is not completely out of place within her work, implicated as it is, yet again, in a phenomenological engagement of the viewer’s physicality.

This op art, Magic Eye–like quality becomes more pronounced in “Alhambras,” the series of Granada landscapes, painted between 1984 and 1986. This is where the work becomes its most literal; the paintings explicitly depict the titular buildings emerging from behind the surface-front grid. In the artist’s own words, as quoted in the exhibition’s wall text, “Basically, the theme provides me with the tension I need to keep myself in an ambiguous middle position, between an abstraction that disdains its own system and a figuration that recoils from direct images and even metaphorical reference.” To the point: there are places in “Alhambras” where Sevilla originally appears to uncharacteristically break the grid with a washy atmospheric paint smudge—only to reveal on closer inspection a pale, just subtly visible, perfectly color-coordinated grid placed right on top of the faux-expressionist daub.

This stylistic tension reaches its peak in the early aughts “Insomnio” cycle. Painted in oil, in a tight pattern of brushy curlicues, the pieces reinterpret the grid in a pattern of countless ornamental repetitive strokes. Insomnio de paz y de conflicto (2002) in its transition from a densely saturated left side of luminous black and gray cascades that may at first blush resemble a tree canopy, to the loose wash of Robert Ryman-esque white on the right, is here the most representative at telling us “Look! It’s only paint,” breaking with metaphor by way of pseudo-illusionistic abstraction.

In the most recent paintings in the show, Horizonte pequeño 7 (2023) and Horizonte blanco horizontal (2024) among them, the Sempere influence seems to return, as does the line as the principal element, with op art–like tightly striped canvases in minutely graduated hues that appear to kinetically pulsate and undulate. A reinterpretation of the Meninas model, these point at a figurative motif only to deconstruct and abstract it, all the while dazzling with their feat of manual labor: a fitting coda for the exhibition’s story of endlessly recursive oscillation between logic and phenomenology, structure and expression, and their mutual generation and destruction.