Hugo Fontela

HUGO FONTELA (Grado, Asturias, 1986).
"Watermark", Manhattan, NYC, 2008.
Mixed media on canvas.
Signed, dated and located on the back.
Measurements: 90 x 90 cm; 94 x 94 cm (frame).
This work is part of a particularly significant stage in Hugo Fontela's artistic career, marked by a process of stylistic consolidation and conceptual maturation. Based in Manhattan since 2005, Fontela has devoted several series to the representation of the New York piers, a theme that has allowed him to explore, from a personal and deeply lyrical perspective, the possibilities of abstract figuration. Works such as Piers, Big Pier and Blue Piers reveal an aesthetic approach in which an enveloping and misty atmosphere predominates, charged with contained emotionality, and which transcends the merely representational to enter the realm of the evocative.
In the painting analyzed here, the communicative and expressive capacity of the artist is evident, who, through a deliberate economy of means, achieves a composition of great formal sobriety and visual elegance.
The prestigious young painter of Asturian origin, Hugo Fontela, has dedicated several series to Manhattan, where he has lived since 2005. In the painting that concerns us, his communicative and expressive power is evident, using the minimum elements, achieving a composition of great visual elegance. His language, although abstract, lets us read between the lines stories buried in the memory. The artist explains that he usually starts from the image of a place, often an urban landscape, which has been engraved in his memory, and then visualizes that imprint on canvas or paper. His goal is to build pieces in which the unreal is an essential aspect in order to understand them, to create new realities and to ensure that the image that moved him at the beginning also moves the viewer. His love for painting began in childhood. From the hand of the Asturian painter Amado González Hevia (Favila), he entered the School of Arts and Crafts of Avilés when he was fourteen years old. He later entered the Oviedo School of Art, and when he was about to begin studying for a degree in Fine Arts, he decided to move to New York and joined the Art Students League of New York. In 2005 he received the BMW Painting Award, in the twentieth edition, and in 2007 he won the prize for best artist at the Graphic Art Fair ESTAMPA,3 awarded by the Association of Art Critics of Madrid. In 2006, together with Juan Hidalgo, he participated as a guest at the XVIII Bienal de Pintura de Zamora. In 2011 the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat, in Barcelona, begins an exhibition of his works made in America, which is inaugurated by the Prince and Princess of Asturias. That same year, as a result of two stays in Rio de Janeiro with Oscar Niemeyer (2009 and 2011), the exhibition Niemeyer by Fontela is held at the Niemeyer Center in Avilés. Banco Sabadell has his work. Among the centers that have exhibited his works are the Casa de Vacas in Madrid, the Revillagigedo Palace in Gijón, the Círculo de Arte in Barcelona, the Cervantes Institute in Chicago, the 100kubik Gallery in Cologne, the Niemeyer Center, the Gabarron Foundation and the Carles Taché Gallery in Barcelona.