IBIZA.- Rafa Macarrón (Madrid, 1981) is the first Spanish artist to exhibit at La Nave Salinas Foundation in Ibiza. Macarrón follows KAWS, Keith Haring, Marco Brambilla, Bill Viola, and Kenny Scharf. These artists represent the pinnacle of contemporary art; as they are all masters of Street Art, video art, or Pop Surrealism in their own right.

Macarrón now joins the ranks of these esteemed artists as a young Spanish talent who is carving out a place for himself in the international art scene. His work is already in important collections around the world, and he has been exhibited in Porto, New York, Miami, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Toronto, Istanbul, and Bogota. His latest solo exhibition was at the CAC Museum in Malaga. Now, in the summer of 2021, he presents El bañista / The Bather at La Nave Salinas. Macarrón’s works explore his characteristic shape-shifting characters, which are full of humility and naturally move away from solitude. These empathetic figures allow viewers to follow Macarrón’s work in fascination.

The exhibition, which is open until October 31st, brings together more than 15 paintings of various compositions. Macarrón created all of them in 2021. In them, the artist explores different worlds of his own creation. He shows darker paintings of largescale vertical formats along with bright horizontal panoramic landscapes. In his horizontal works, Macarrón presents thousands of individual scenes that happen simultaneously within one painting and one moment. Juxtapositions are found within the vertical and horizontal works. The artist explores tensions between overcrowded beaches and solitary figures, and between saturated color and monochromatic schemes.

As Juan Manuel Bonet, the former director of the Reina Sofia National Museum and the IVAM, points out, it was the critic Ruben Suarez who defined Macarrón’s work well. Suarez writes, “The type of trend the work cultivates is directly related to art historical traditions and references. Macarrón’s fantastic figuration is simultaneously ethical and ornamental, and it quotes abstraction, surrealism, and expressionism. His work is also in conversation with the Cobra group, relating to Alechinsky, Dubuffet, Alfonso Fraile, and through Miró and Arshile Gorky, for whom Andre Breton invented hybrid characters. Bonet himself points out, “From the start, Rafa Macarrón is clear that he wants to speak with more light humor than dark humor, with more compassion than cruelty, about his daily life, his own existence, and the wonder he experiences in his world. Macarrón starts by working with a loud range of colors, and then he moves to working on darker areas. This is a style inspired by painters like the forementioned artists- Picasso, Picabia, Duchamp, Dubuffet, Arroyo, and Gordillo. He also works within the language of comedy, as he paints interiors, landscapes, beaches, the cosmic, the bestiary, and human likenesses.”




Macarrón defines his work: “It is expressionism because it is born from a gesture, but also a new figuration. To create my elongated figures requires knowledge and respect for anatomy. I know the structure of the body perfectly. Then, I begin to try out distortions and deformations, which I think works very well. I am able to create my own characters, each with their own soul and personality.”

Critics, always ready to tie work back to art historical references, find allusions to Basquiat, Dubuffet, and Picasso in Macarrón’s work. Art historical quotations are also found locally, when we speak of the work of Millares, Fraile, and Goya’s Half-Sunken Dog.

“Rafa’s work excited me from the beginning. His images seemed to be born between the constellations of Joan Miró and the optimistic landscapes of Manuel H. Mompó. In this sense, Rafa is an heir to an important tradition of Spanish painting that I personally admire. I have a firm intuition that he will do justice to this tradition of artistic success.” Says Lio Malca, head of La Nave Salinas Foundation and one of the earliest and most important collectors of Keith Haring and Basquiat. Malca is also one of the leading lenders of Basquiat’s and Haring’s works for exhibitions around the world. Malca adds, “the first time I saw Rafa’s work, I quickly imagined it among the pine trees and the Mediterranean Sea that surrounds La Nave Salinas. I saw his work as an organic and integral part of the Ibiza landscape. The paintings celebrate the life of the beaches, the people, the warm sunsets Ibiza is known for, and the natural park that surrounds the space. Rafa’s work and La Nave Salinas are going to get along very well!”

Pedaling Towards the Summit

After leaving the Institute, Macarrón was a professional cyclist. Rafa channels the same individual, solitary effort with which he peddles to reach the top of the Tourmalet towards his paintings. The artist says, “on the bike, I enter the same state of flow that I achieve by painting. I can spend eight, ten hours, without stopping- I don’t realize the passage of time when I bike or paint.” Macarrón is disciplined and sticks to a strict schedule. This is a lesson learned from cycling. As a painter he is not afraid to work on the large scale, along the 12.5 x 9.5 or 4.5 x 13 foot range. From a distance, his work may appear to be pure expressionism. But, when a viewer approaches the work more closely, they can see hundreds of drawings of characters within the scope of the work in the manner of a contemporary Bosco or Brueghel. In 2010, Macarrón won the prestigious BMW Prize and in 2013 he was chosen as the most interesting artist at the ARCO art fair in Madrid.

Macarrón always begins on A4 sheets. He is a tireless draftsman. His sketches sometimes appear on the canvas, but they are never exactly the same. He works quickly; it takes him no more than a week to finish a painting so that his work doesn’t lose freshness. Rafa confesses, “The work has to be spontaneous, even if it is carefully thought-out.” To achieve this spontaneity, Rafa uses colors that don’t complement each other, and he uses a wide range of materials. He says, “Pencils, markers, and the painter’s hand provides the plot for the work. Waxes, like acrylics and gouaches, provide nuanced transparencies within the work. Oil is the most complex to paint with, as primary medium that adds weight to the painting with small dots, fillings, and textures. Spray paint gives modernity, dynamism, and color to my work.” Macarrón is also deeply inspired by his books. At the entrance to his studio, there are catalogs by Mark Rothko, Gorky, de Kooning, Oehlen, Dubuffet, Miró, Guerrero, and Barjola. They are, perhaps, declarations of intent. He also has works and biographies of Le Corbusier. In fact, Macarrón assembles his canvases from the perfected system of measurements by the French architect.