Menchu Lamas
Come Fly Away
The exhibition Anda-Ven-Vuela (Come Fly Away) should be thought of as a great work and a major installation. In it we find the recurring language that appears throughout Menchu Lamas”s body of work: the creation of motifs that the viewer can recognise, forms and elements that distinguish her way of punctuating the work – the line, the dot – and a particular use of colour. The creation of an immersive experience from simple principles is a constant feature. The installation occupies the entire museum space, thus creating the illusion of a great embrace. As in a primitive cave or the vault of a great cathedral, the goal is to create an atmosphere in which we and the work coexist. Almost all of the works – almost 80 paintings – are new. With the logic of creating a family, Menchu Lamas produces a large set of works that are interconnected, starting from the same impulse and the same idea. In her own words: “Art is the synthesis of reality. Starting with an internal motive that for me has a lot of strength and catches me. I work on the painting in an attempt to capture the dream inside me.”
For Menchu Lamas, painting makes enables a dynamic relationship between the visualisation of mental forms and the capacity and freedom of interpretation that each one of us has when viewing these images. The painting first lives in the mind and hand of the artist and then, int he here and now, it lives in us. The transfer of imaginative and vital energy is made possible by the work. The work does not do this only once, but also maintains that possibility forever. In this sense, painting maintains a political alliance with the idea of freedom, continuity with life, and the transmission of symbolic and ethical values from generation to generation.
Menchu Lama writes: “I was always interested in colour and painting as a subject: I think that this gives you all the freedom to do whatever you want. In art, beyond the medium used, what counts is the ability to transmit emotions and achieve an intense and full work. Painting is a conceptual tool that at the same time has an irreplaceable immediacy, where the body and the passion of the gaze are present.”
In this sense, it can be said that Menchu Lamas’ work deliberately seeks to create a universe that is easy to access, simple, direct and at the same time beautiful, open, naive, and attentive to the great archaic myths. It is closely committed to the wisdom of the popular and spontaneously naive. Menchu Lamas’ work seeks a situation in which we not only understand the work, but the work itself is constituted as such. In this sense, we, the viewers, are central. But we should also consider that this ‘we’ could be extended to animals, forests, rivers and oceans. We see the work here, at MUSAC, but it is not unreasonable to think that the work could be displayed in the heart of a forest, stand before us on a Galician beach, or share its space with the granite formations of the Galician mountains. Yes, the museum is very convenient, but Menchu Lamas invites us not just to look, but to be, to stay and to let our senses and the feelings of the work flow together for a while.
Menchu Lamas. Come Fly Away
01.10.2022 – 28.05.2023
MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León
www.musac.es
León, Spain
2022