For her first solo show, held in 1989 and titled Pintura, Alejandra Icaza (Bilbao, 1966) chose to use a black-and-white photograph of a girl making a chalk drawing on an asphalt road surface. Almost 40 years later, she has chosen the title Circus for her exhibition at MARCO. Two choices that epitomize her deeply personal approach. The first alludes to her understanding of painting as an attitude bound up with life, one that naturally integrates line and drawing, and is able to bring together memory and play. The ascetic treatment of her images is matched by her meticulous, colourful body of work, containing small collages weaving colour, words and fragments together, in a clear invitation for the viewer to enter an intimate world, full of references that feel personal yet invite dialogue, complicity, and play. The idea of the circus, as both enjoyment and challenge, dynamism and rigour, is an apt epithet for an oeuvre that remains faithful to certain qualities while showing varying moments of intensity.

The Dadaist Hugo Ball once said that an artist’s work may be understood by their choice of scale, citing Paul Klee and Kandinsky as opposite examples: a predilection for small formats versus a need to expand across the space. Alejandra Icaza starts out on a scale akin to Klee’s, adept at heightening nuance and evocation, but over time she has not hesitated to enlarge her format, while retaining a fondness for laying down grounds of colour, with a highly personal palette achieved by mixing oil and wax, drawing onto the paint with incisions, like someone preparing an engraving. She also dares to take on difficult formats, which force her to work the surface as if it were a field — which it is — dispensing with concepts such as perspective, flooding the picture with easily recognisable symbols, in a kind of emotional hieroglyph that recalls childhood memory, but also the practice of Flemish painters or Eastern miniatures.

Alejandra Icaza likes to test limits, to break with the predictable. At times she steps outside the boundaries of the painting to fill the space with objects, or does the unexpected by treating her workplace and her home interchangeably. A deliberate blurring exists between the two, which leads us to experience the paintings as dreamlike spaces, despite recognising the undertone of familiarity conveyed by the symbols, the recurring use of colour, or the apparent simplicity of compositions that are in fact very meticulously and carefully crafted as fragments placed in dialogue.

“The first question to arise when talking about painting –the artist notes– is whether it is realist or abstract, as if that might enable us to label it into two broad categories, and from there, classify it. For me, there are no borders. What is an abstract painting if not an exterior or interior landscape seen through someone’s eyes? What is a figurative painting? The reality of a particular time of day. But that reality is filtered, as understood by a human being, with a sky perceived as cobalt or pink. Emotions, concepts, and the artist’s own weaving of ideas also shape realist painting. Whether the brushstroke is broken, smooth, or forcefully applied. The painter’s pulse is like the rhythm of the picture, like a symphony, a ticking clock, more measured or faster”. The idea is clear: “Once, a university professor, giving one of those dreaded critiques, at the end of term, asked me: "And what did you intend with that painting?" Well, simply that, to paint a painting.”

Miguel Fernández-Cid, curator of the exposición