“The Visionary World of José Molina” Exhibition

Able Fine Art NY Gallery

This event has ended.

Able Fine Art NY Gallery presents “The Visionary World of José Molina,” the first New York solo exhibition of José Molina; a collection of surreal, mesmerizing images formed with technical precision and executed with the intent to evoke the perplexing depths of human emotion. In this exhibition, Molina will debut his unedited project: “Our daily masks,” a collection of spontaneous creations, offspring of a stream of consciousness, which every day spurns him to craft a different mask, each one with its own story to tell. Through his art, José Molina opens the door to a world of outlandish monsters, allowing the viewer to rediscover their own complex selves through his world of revelations.

José Molina, a Spanish artist, has been studying art since the age of 11. At age 18, Molina worked in advertising while he attended the University of Fine Arts in Madrid. He has recently exhibited his work in China, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, and Spain. With his amazingly creative perspective on human life and the environment, his works have been requested to be in numerous public and private collections.

The exhibition features a large spectrum of Molina’s work in two main aspects: his technical proficiency and exceptionally creative and surrealist power. His cycle-collections display continuity with their own narration through Molina’s introspective view on the complexity of human nature and the environment surrounding it. In his art, Molina presents reality and the

distortion of it, as if to see humanity more clearly through the lens of surrealist absurdities. In his debut series “Predatores,” Molina explores the human identity, human’s animal instinct towards their own kind. Here, Molina’s Ants II (2005) expresses through dreamlike contortions the human state of being trapped by one’s own devices. In his series, “The Monsters Under My Bed,” the monsters refer to the dangers human beings hide from themselves rather than confront. Molina’s two drawings from the series, both titled Unhealthy Love (2016), are made up of figures that stretch skin to contain and display unnatural, external growths; Molina uses the visible, impossible contortion of human bodies to express the emotional depths within. Through his amazing, hyper-realistic drawings, Molina challenges photography with his incredible creatures, inconceivable by camera. Additionally, Molina is now extending his artistic interest into sculpture. His piece I Remember (2017), of his “I Feel” series, literally unravels the human mind using the sculpture’s three-dimensionality to serve as layers of the human soul. Most recently, Molina’s compilation series “Daily Masks” touches on topics ranging from ecology to history, from mythology to reality, using his stream of consciousness at different moments in time to make up a composite of characters and personas. While the first six masks will be put on display at this exhibition, by the end of the year, the whole project will have produced 64 individual pieces. Through his art, Molina juxtaposes the scene and the unseen as they remain, in his work, simultaneously distorted and revealed, a visible gift to his audience.

Molina’s artistic techniques are founded in his trained mastery of varying mediums: drawing, painting, and sculpture. In his pencil work, Molina’s sharp, greasy strokes create rounded forms that sensitively capture light and shadow, creating photorealistic shapes that are at once impossible and convincingly real. Molina also instills oil with brightness and sharpness, using oil on wood to capture colors that are vibrant and vividly true to life. In his painting Early Morning (2015), from his series “Beloved Earth,” Molina’s use of oil shimmering astutely depicts a woman’s body sprouting wings made of tree roots. Molina’s attentiveness to form is evident in his sculptural series “Bites,” where Molina investigates the theme of power as a flawed and oppressive force, using resin and acid-treated wood to create large, lifelike teeth that seem to take over his forms (much like the overwhelming effects of power). Molina’s versatility instills his audience with various entries into different worlds—artistic worlds that allow his viewers to see their own more clearly.

In an interview with Jaqueline Ceresoli of Style Art, Molina stated, “I am greatly interested in the human being. What hides inside, what he/she feels, how he/she communicates and relates with the outside world.” Surrealism for him is an investigative tool, the language of hidden truths. As he unwraps the self, Molina gives his viewers an understanding of the gravity of their relationship to a society full of dreams, truths, and illusions, where the power of understanding comes from within.