Presenting No Words, Only Painting a new solo show by Miguel Rio Branco (1946, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain). The exhibit proposes the primacy of visual language over any themes or narratives external to the images.
Galeria Millan and Miguel Rio Branco collaborated for two decades. During that time, the artist held various solo exhibitions, the first of which took place in 2002, titled Teoria da cor; followed by Gritos Surdos (2004), Dislecsia (2007), Divagações de um Fugu Delirante (2009), La mécanique des femmes 2 (2012) and Barro (2016).
“In times where we feel like being silent, I hope to be able to indicate paths, some pleasant, others less so, but directions away from frightening stillness,” adds the artist. His works fully exploit the potential of different visual languages, achieving the integration of some with others. Combining photographic images, Miguel Rio Branco creates rhythm, volumes and perspectives that suggest cinematographic editing processes.
According to the artist, “the show is just a dialogue between images without a specific place or time. From the pictorial to the symbolic, far from the themes that are generally the sin of those who think about photography and always relate it to a place, to a time, to a document, to a social proposal. It’s not that photographic images no longer function as a kind of document, they always will. The difference here comes from the influences of painting, collage and cinema. We enter situations of emotional visual aesthetics where the rug of reality is pulled under the feet of those who are not familiar with my work, which has been heading in this direction since the mid-1970s.” The works gathered in this exhibition show Rio Branco’s subjective gaze in his relationship with art as an act of formal construction of space, objects and situations.