Almudena Lanceolada’s works are like a gazelle, of the Song of Songs that “peek through the window bars”. The modesty of her line is far from the anthropocentric paw of those who produce landscape, and also of those who conjure up landscape. The beings “graze” on the canvas oblivious to the maddening noise and human affairs. To graze sounds like peace, a state of being in Nature in which nothing terrible happens within sight, no volcanoes or earthquakes or storms on the high seas. The painting comes from a walk where one observes all the things that arise along the path. What is nearby is carefully but surreptitiously observed without digressing into the distant, and painting is done without “revealing” what does not want to be revealed. It is an art of immanence that seems to take Epicurus as its teacher. The serenity that Lanceolada’s work transmits says of being “present” before things, thus freeing us from the entanglements of the past and the future, also from the stories that sacralize that which is taken as holy. In her paintings, a planet is the same size as a seed and, together with other equally heterogeneous beings, they fall towards the earth, the place that supports our weight as we walk. That is why they have to be hung a few centimetres from the ground in order to place us in the right aesthetic perspective. There are only two compositions that rise from the ground: some trees that form a celebration and the shell in Botticelli’s Venus. It is conceivable that they summon us, by force of an iconographic blow, to look erotically between our “bars” to catch a glimpse of a sea hare. It’s there.

Teresa Calbo