Galería Tomas March is proud to present an exhibition of recent work by the painter Xisco Mensua (Barcelona 1960), titled “The Way We Were. On the Death of Painting and Other Studies”, opening 31st March.

Xisco Mensua’s painting is undergirded by his peerless natural bent for drawing. That said, he treats it not as a visual genre in its own right but as a means of constructing a fictional universe; more than a formal support, it is a way of transfiguring common references, whether intimate or biographical, political or social. It is not about recovering a gaze waylaid in the discovery and representation of reality, but rather about questioning that very same reality and demythologising the complexity of its underlying power games.

Mensua’s painting brings to the fore a textual condition of representation that does not vouchsafe any pictorial specificity. It doesn’t matter that a painting is no more than that, a mere painting, and that the depicted images repeat themselves in various works as if they were “patterns” or models, because each time they relate with other images differently, somehow as if the story intuited in each painting were a pretext for other stories we recognise though do not remember. This body of work takes its references from many sources that Mensua makes no pains to hide. On the contrary, he often foregrounds these sources: pages culled from newspapers and magazines, art books or children’s schoolbooks which, in many of his works on paper, he collages alongside his own interpretation of the images therein reproduced. In the case of this exhibition we are now presenting, Mensua outlines three time spans he then develops throughout the series: The Death of Painting, treated with a distance underpinned in equal measure by irony and paradox, Origin and Childhood. In a tone fluctuating between ironic and ineffable, he shows us something that we once were and no longer are; the death we will be and never are; and signs of how we relate ourselves to Art: in writing, reading, representation, theatre and play.