The Moon and Sixpence by Miki Leal

By way of variations around a set of pictorial references, with color, figure and, especially, density as basic elements, Miki Leal proposes an immersive experience, not only of painting, but also of looking.

With a career that now spans two decades, Miki Leal is one of the main representatives of contemporary Spanish painting. From the beginning of his career, his training fell within the scope of the renewal of figurative painting which took place at the beginning of the century.

In his works, he explores and questions isms and genre conventions through a fertile and personal iconography that enhances the close symbiosis between high and low culture, covering topics that go from the history of art itself to mass media. Color and reflection on style embody the essence of his art, giving priority to the painting method over the motif itself. He works in many different media including graphics and ceramics, but always using painting as a reference.

During the last few years, his career as an artist has led him to promote the dialog between figuration and abstraction by exploring the history of the medium itself, its authors and its genres, as an ongoing inquiry into the possibilities of redefining painting – a reflective look at pictorial representations sustained by a network of quotations, references and re-readings that serves as a basis for a complex exercise of intertextuality centered around the act and the experience of painting.

With this approach as his backdrop, the works that make up The Moon and Sixpence by Miki Leal are presented not only as a continued dialog on the issue of painting, but also as a way of looking back and reviewing one’s own path, of examining the conversation that has been held before catching a glimpse of the road ahead.

This reflection also comes with a spatial shift, as Miki Leal created these works during his stay in New York in 2021. A wealth of cross references situated at a crossroads between Europe and America which define the artist’s search process while he submerged in the land of painting on both sides of the Atlantic. During this stay, the spatial shifting resulted in a tension between opposites, a dialog to which the very title of this body of works refers. Europe and America, obviously, but on a deeper level, the link between contemplation and appropriation, the reflective and the mundane, intuition and reflection, what is known and what is yet to be discovered, the motif and its materialization, and once again, figuration and abstraction.

The Moon and Sixpence by Miki Leal will be shown at the Former Residence of the Ambassadors fo Spain alongside Amalgama El Prado by Daniel Canogar.