Xippas is pleased to present Fernando López Lage’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, at its Punta del Este space. The Uruguayan artist is one of the most prominent representatives of contemporary painting on the national scene.

López Lage highlights the irregularity, underlines the very rich and diverse formal games in each of the spaces, privileges the syncopated rhythms and highlights a geometry in which the gesture of the hand and the brush always plays: the artist’s mark is noticeable, the matter that is present, the texture, which is what makes his work so dense and distances it from all coldness.

Color is what gives entity to his painting, it plays the role of drawing, perspective, shadow, volume and is always ready to impose itself on the material. The pleasure of painting in large format and intense colors is essential for López Lage. The eye is surprised and delighted by the splendor of oranges, yellows, greens, reds, and various shades in this explosion of creativity that revolves around color and dynamic geometry.

Alicia Haber, Montevideo, 2014.

Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales.

Contingency sensor

I participate in a gestation, when I paint I operate as a sensor. The layers of color overlap leaving traces. The stains of painting impose themselves. Painting, in my adventure as the engine of a voluntary and sometimes conflictive encounter, leaves behind the subjective and objective impulses to define itself as a collaborative act, to which I give myself without knowing how much resistance the work will impose, when it will be the moment when it will derive to one or another transformation, to observe how form and color cut its own genealogy. The painting that emerges before me, each one of them, exhibits an autonomous, symbiotic body. A body that coexists with the uncertain, the twisted, the stained, the dripped. A quadrilateral and flat form where this body expands to find spaces, contingencies, superpositions, ravings that have nothing geometric, but rather organic. I live in a symbiosis between the shape of the frame that generates patterns of forms and the color that fits in an unrestricted way, a Pharmakon color, without laws, which gives the incipient body of the painting an elixir for its own consolidation as an object, as a body.

Fernando López Lage, Febrero 2022.