After spending the summer driving around all over the Island visiting some of our best-known international artists, sculptors, ceramists and painters, it was lovely to find an artist on our doorstep this week.
It means we have the opportunity and the privilege to show some of the new works of Aída Miró Vicente, at the age of 26 already being seen as one of our most talented and creative young painters.
We travelled just five kilometres from Sant Antoni to Buscastell or Forada, as the area should be properly known. There, right in front of the tiny church that doesn’t look like a church, is the “Bar-Art-Gallery Can Tixedó”, where Aída Miró exhibits her latest creations.
The gallery was opened in the bar about four years ago by a young businessperson and art-lover, Juan Colomar, the eldest son of the Colomar family, “Juanito de Can Tixedó” (he himself possesses a real, natural talent for drawing and the opening of the gallery was the result of his artistic interest).
Since its opening, the gallery has been working non-stop, showing exhibitions successfully one after the other all the year around.
From the very beginning, Juanito and the gallery had the support and the backing of real experts, some of the best artists from the Island and also his personal friends (Toni Hormigo, Julio Bauzá, Mario Stafforini, Pedro Hormigo and Ginés among others). Their advice and exhibitions have helped a lot in the success and the good name of the gallery.
But one of the intentions of Juanito, as gallery manager, is to open doors to new, young, talented artists. He always keeps a few weeks in the year to exhibit new material from new artists, local or outsiders, as he did two years ago with Aída Miró in her first individual exhibition in Sant Antoni (her second individual exhibition on the Island).
So we all met last Tuesday, Aída Miró, Juanito Tixedó, Gary and I, to see and to witness Aída’s latest works “Desnudas y Bailando”, as she has called the series of paintings that she is presenting in this exhibition.
What we can see at the gallery is a selection of paintings of female bodies are done with a technique that is improving in every new work and contain quite a good dose of female sensitiveness and sensuality.
But they are also done with intense passion as one can see in the strong and hot background colours.
Aída Miró Vicente was born in Eivissa on 14th August 1976, and passed her childhood living in the country with her Ibicenco family.
In 1992, at the age of sixteen, Aída started her artistic studies at the “Escola d’Arts i Oficis d’Eivissa” (the local Art School), where she passed her first degrees in Art. Two years later, Aída matriculated in Fine Arts at the Valencia University (Facultad de Bellas Artes San Carlos, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia), in which she gained the highest marks in 2000.
She started studying the speciality of art restoration, because “I was extremely interested in knowing and learning the techniques and the processing of this discipline. But after a time, I felt like I had to do my own. I got tired of working on somebody else’s jobs, so, I started doing my own paintings."
“I always used oil-paint, I also have used other techniques, basically to know them, but with the oil I get the results that I want.”
“I started with paintings related to Africa and the 'Black' music. They were always figurative, the human figure and portraits."
“When I finished my studies, after passing my degrees, I went for a trip, and I ended up in a circus school in Barcelona (Escuela de Circo Rogelio Rivel). For two years I was studying circus techniques, like acrobatics, theatre, dance and humour. Then I had little time for painting. Even so, I carried on painting also exhibiting and presenting my paintings to concourses."
“In this, my last exhibition for the moment, “Desnudas y Bailando” (Naked and Dancing) I mean to reflect a little of this world, the performance, the spectacle, in which I have introduced myself. This exhibition is also exclusively of feminine themes. I work with naked bodies and ballerinas, the movement and the human figure."
“I never had a studio exclusively mine, just for painting; I have always painted at home, waiting for the place and the time to begin to paint, most of the times at night when my family was in bed. Then I had the place and the time for me to paint."
“In my house in Barcelona, the apartment walls were painted pink with red and purple. This is why I started using these background colours in my glamorous girls’ paintings in this exhibition."
“I believe that femininity can never be as well represented by man as by woman; it is seen from another point of view, with other eyes."
“Women have always been a high motive of inspiration, representing the beauty for the masculine eyes, for painters and poets, but also the greed of possession, of domination."
“I paint from references of photography that I take myself or that I find in good photography books and adapt them to my representative intentions. Most of the time these photos are black and white, then I choose the colours that I want to use. They can be very varied, depending on how I feel at the time, the ideas and feelings that I try to express in my paintings."
“Colours always have been what impassionate me most in the paintings; the sensations that they produce and the effects that one can reach with the contrast of them."
“Now my plans are to keep on studying. I’m extremely interested in the world of performance, of the circus and the spectacle, and to paint about this world. In September I will go to Bristol, in the UK, where I will start a new course of scenography. It is my intention to increase my knowledge in the two fields, to join the two worlds, to create scenography and paintings inspired by this world and its people.
“The world of art galleries doesn’t interest me so much. There is a little too much frivolity in it. All I really want is to have more time to learn and paint, to be able to follow a line of creativity that I have already got clear in my mind.”
Exhibitions
1996
Collective: Sala Josep Renau, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
1997
Collective: Art Jove, Galería Alhadros, Eivissa, Balears, Spain
Individual: Teteria Hierbabuena, Valencia, Spain
Individual: Bar-Galería Los Picapiedra, Valencia, Spain
1998
Collective: Supermercado del Arte, Eivissa, Balears, Spain
1998
Individual: Pub Area, Eivissa, Balears, Spain
Individual: Bar-Galería Negrito, Valencia, Spain
1999
Collective: XX Certamen Minicuadros, Casa de Cultura de Elda
Proyecto l’Atzucat, Facultad de San Carlos, U. P. De Valencia, Spain
Art Jove Exposición, Itinerante, Balears, Spain (4th Award)
BP Portrait Award, Ustler Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Colegio Mayor Galileo Galilei, U. P. De Valencia, Spain
2000
Individual: Bar-Galería Can Tixedo, Buscastell, Eivissa, Balears. Spain
Collective: Enla piel del Cordero, Sala Micalet 1, Valencia, Spain
Collective: Art Jove, Exposición Itinerante, Balears, Spain
2001
Individual: Bar-Galería On, Barcelona, Spain
Collective: Art Jove, Exposición Itinerante, Balears, Spain
Collective: Bienal Nacional de Pintura Victor Siurana, Lleida, Spain
Collective: Bar-Galería Can Tixedó”, Buscastell, Eivissa, Balears, Spain
2002
Individual: Teteria La Clandestina, Barcelona, Spain
Bar-Galería Can Tixedó, Buscastell, Eivissa, Balears, Spain
All Pictures Courtesy of Aída Miró Vicente
José P Ribas