Sobre mesas y paisajes
Stain Projects
Álvaro Porras
November - January 2024
Álvaro Porras’ (1992, Ciudad Real) first exhibition in Mallorca is titled "On Tables and Landscapes" and represents the culmination of a research and exchange project that materializes a hypothesis about painting. The exhibition draws from the study of Claude Monet’s "Haystacks" series, painted in the summer of 1890 and the spring of 1891. In these paintings, Monet chose stacks of straw and hay as his pictorial motif—mundane objects that offered a clear perspective on what truly mattered to him: the effect of light and, consequently, the vibration of color. Within the dialectical shift inherent in the history of painting, these works also carried an invitation to abstraction. Kandinsky and Mondrian recognized this open door when they first viewed the paintings. Álvaro Porras has also crossed this threshold, speculating on this moment in the history of painting through minimal gestures, conceptual relationships, shifts, and collaborations.
The exhibition presents an interior landscape whose vanishing point is located at the center of the painting "Yellow." From its base, a dark triangle emerges, reminiscent of Monet’s haystacks—those material accumulations placed on a horizon line that serve as the catalysts for this project. In the center of the room, slightly elevated from the floor, a table holds three loaves of bread. If the haystack, made of straw, symbolizes excess, the bread represents the final materialization of a long process beginning with wheat, thereby connecting the landscape and the table.
From that table, with its marks and holes, come the small-format paintings "The Same Translated into Dots" and "The Same Translated into Lines," which arise from playing with negative space. To the right of the central piece, two subtle drawings hang: "Vasili" and "Piet," just a few lines of graphite on paper that represent both a horizon and the minimal depiction of a table—a vaporous concept of an everyday object. In this way, the table extends in minimal gestures from all four sides, shaping an exhibition characterized by visual lightness and a constant play of cross-references.
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