Pareidolia
 

There are many ways to describe the activity of the artist who works with abstractions, the images are detached from representation and seek to express without denoting or simply affirming their presence on the canvas as realities with their own dignity. The painter evades recognizable forms; the sense, legitimate or not, imposed by similarity, analogy and, in general, the links that take an image away from the chaos of nameless forms to link it to the supposed order of the world.

The human perceptual structure, however, works in the opposite direction. The brain insists that we see faces and animal figures where there are only clouds or wet patches; this phenomenon is part of children's play and, in its extreme form, can be the prelude to psychosis. The canvas is the terrain where these two gravitational forces engage in their perpetual battle: the artist tries to escape the well-known form, and the viewer's nervous system confronts the image on a defenseless canvas. Gadea's paintings seem to repeat Goethe's Faust: Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast. Souls that are enemies, it is understood.

In a sea of color zones and nameless forms, larval figurations, insinuations of pictorial gestures try to impose themselves as an invitation to the viewer to rescue them from their ambiguity. The force of abstraction and the weight of the unpredictable line confront these visual germs, which, consistent in their radical opposition, affirm each other.

We are left with the question: What part of this duplicity is accidental and what part is the artist's deliberate work; what part of what we see and feel is an aesthetic intervention and what part is a playful invitation to search and a sense of humor? This work proposes to explore the distance between perception and intellect, halfway between reason and intuition.

Guillermo Cerceau/Writer