In her second solo show in Brazil – Alejandra Icaza had her first in Galeria Fortes Vilaça in 2002 – the Spanish artist presents six new paintings, all made in 2006. Four of them follow the lexicon already established in her work since 2000: monochromatic backgrounds over which Icaza distributes oneiric forms, such as colored circles, animals, and leaves. Her pictorial vocabulary also contemplates writing drawn with a dry point, removing paint from the painting’s surface, drawings of fragmented human figures, foliage, and other organic forms.

In two of the paintings presented in this exhibition, Icaza reinaugurates painting with a tendency to abstraction; this is because, at the end of the 1990s, she flirted with abstraction, principally in collages in the form of colored mosaics that bordered on geometry. In these new works – entitled The Tree and Tree at Night – the repetition of elements is gradually replaced by synthesis and by a concentration of organic forms that refer, as their titles indicate, to images of trees.

The first –The Tree – still retains the memory of colored circles punctuating the composition. Tree at Night shows a tree reduced to minimal elements of identification, with vestiges of wood splinters carved into the canvas. Both show an artist engaged with pictorial language and distant from any type of symbolisms or narratives. “I am now looking for a less romantic, less ornamental path, I want to make stronger and more visceral paintings, to exchange feminine delicacy for brute matter,” Icaza explains.

Among the exhibitions in which she has recently participated, highlights include her solo show at the Salamanca Art Center in Spain in 2004, the exhibition Eclipse (2003) in the Pedro Cera Gallery in Lisbon, Portugal, and her 2001 solo show at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York.