Soledad Sevilla [Waiting for Sempere]

Soledad Sevilla [Waiting for Sempere] is a special exhibition in the artist's trajectory: a project that closes a vital and creative circle and that, at the same time, is essential for the MACA, a museum whose origins are intimately linked to the collection of Alicante artist Eusebio Sempere.
 

Sevilla and Sempere met in the 1960s. Between them arose a mutual admiration and "a deep and heartfelt friendship," while they coincided in some of the most relevant projects around geometric abstraction in the Spanish artistic context. A common interest in line, a rigorous practice of composition, and a drift toward the sensitive—toward a softer and more emotional geometry—connect the work of Sempere and Sevilla. This poetic affinity with the Alicante artist runs through Sevilla's entire career: from the beginnings to her most recent production, such as the series painted since the summer of 2022 conceived as inspiration and homage to her friend. Sevilla finds in light and line, like Sempere, a sensible emotion, a rigorous and deliberate stillness.
 

Starting from the pieces from the 1970s that we preserve in the museum's collections, the exhibition focuses its attention on the artist's most recent series. These are large-format paintings in which the vibration of the line, as filament or thread, generates surfaces that expand and continuously recompose themselves. These works envelop the viewer and invite them to experience the painting not only from sight, but also in a performative way, from the body that shares the space with it. Contemplation thus becomes a physical experience that unleashes intimate emotions. Sevilla manages to show the total space as a unity and, within it, deploy a wide range of registers and subtle variations. Geometry, far from being cold or distant, acquires here an intimate and introspective character.
 

A rigorous and disciplined artist, Sevilla works guided by intuition… As she herself states, her frameworks are "background for thought and art passes over it like a kind of reflection." Sempere himself describes it perfectly: "Why speak of painting if you are seeing it?"