Galería Tomás March is proud to present “Llegando a Xuwan” an exhibition of recent paintings by the artist Nico Munuera (Lorca, 1974). Based in Valencia since 1993, he has had several one-person shows like ”Irrumpiendo suavemente” and “La Grosse Badaboum” in T20 Murcia, in Bores & Mallo Lisbon and Magda Bellotti in Madrid. Also worth underlining are a series of three exhibitions conjointly with Hernández Pijuán in Barcelona, Madrid and Murcia as part of Cajamadrid’s “Relevos” programme. Munuera has work in many major collections in Spain: Fundación la Caixa, Ministry of Culture, Helga de Alvear Collection, Banco de España, VAC, etc.

Painting is leaning over the cliff-edge,
entering a cave,
speaking to a well and the water responding.

These lines by the painter and writer Ramón Gaya might well be a good starting point for a proper understanding of Nico Munuera’s painting as well as his attitude to it.
Tension and uncertainty that is almost always hidden behind an outer façade of calm.
The emphatic physicality of the masses of colour shown to us in all their bareness with nothing more than the smooth surface of the support that we are pulled up short against and which at once draws us in like a black hole.
Presence without absence. Nothing is missing, though nothing exists.
Llegando a Xuwan evokes a faraway place to which we are transported by the stains on Japanese paper. Yet Xuwan is a concept taken from Chinese painting to describe the ideal position of the wrist before beginning to paint. Something physical and of course mental which, though not recognised as such, painters feel.
Colour fields, lines, unique gestures, landscapes, non-landscapes, stains, fantasies and everything that the spectator can experience in a world of abstraction which, for the painter, is more concrete than life, because it is immobile, silent painting. Only that, though that’s a lot.

“I'm not really sure what I'm saying since what I do is paint and not speak. This is a question that causes me many headaches whenever I have to talk about painting. I'm normally stubborn and I don't like dogmatic analyses of works because words belong to a different realm than painting. We might talk about what we feel when we see a painting or we could repeat what we have picked up from a book about this or that work, but none of the words that we use actually express what a painting is. When I paint, there is no preconceived message that I then try to transcribe in colour. I relate to the painting directly from the paint; from its different lights, intensities, tones, transparency, etc. If no one asks me, I know what it is; but if you ask me and I have to explain it, I don’t know how.”

B.Rostock