Paula Otegui

The stylistic and technical solvency with which Paula Otegui
supports her fascinating settings is remarkable; the expansive balance that
she amalgamates them seems natural, without dissonant accents or
inordinate resources. A certain flora, an unlikely geography, a rare figuration
have grown on the canvas with the same opulent simplicity with which
nature imposes its infinite forms on the real world. In this current, the
iconographic factors of a botany that are closer to the invention of the
marvelous tale than to scientific nomenclature, and of a landscape that is
paradisiacal longing and arbitrary germination rather than referential
resonance, are interwoven and camouflaged. Here and there strange
characters can be glimpsed, joyfully imbricated in these gardens of
sketching delights, humidified by an atmosphere of hypnotic irradiation.
When we let ourselves be impregnated by it, we perceive that Otegui
connects sensually, and offers us an equivalent intimacy according to the
hedonism of doing and looking, with a secret complicit perversity. Candid
little houses, streams and swamps that come out of the sweet fever
experienced by some dazzled passerby while crossing her imaginary jungle
utopia, coexist with perfectly extemporaneous spots and brushstrokes in the
excess of it, to redefine the structural intonation of the entire composition.
When the optic of the piece is inverted, the background is then black, with
the motifs cut out in a milky white and almost primordial, with a bony
luminosity, like plankton, generating renewed restlessness in a scene that is
as fabulous as it is spectral. At the same time, color, concentrated especially
in those rhythmic circles and lunar spheres, also operates as a counterpoint
factor and chromatic alteration, productively disturbing the tonal quality of
the whole. With one foot on the most virtuous manga tradition, and a certain
relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist universe, plus a wellunderstood
and better resolved decorativeness and ornamentation, the artist
constructs her anomalous greenhouse, fertile in foliage of uncertain origin, in
clouds. , slime, specters, pelambres and branches, installed in a perpetual
movement of tension and backwater, sinuosity and strictness, unleashed
graphics and detailed precision, invariably fed by a dark and intoxicating
sage.