BEATRIZ BARRAL

Born 1968 Madrid, Spain, lives and works in Madrid, Spain

In Beatriz Barral's paintings, like her recent architectural environments, the artist navigates through the loaded potential of highly colored or reflective surfaces in a painting language that can evoke high tech design or science fictional décor at the same time as architectural preoccupations ranging from the formalist to the psychedelic.

In the artist's in situ works, the visitor steps virtually into a Beatriz Barral painting, and physically into a space in which visual stimuli are complemented by the arousal of other senses or desires. The artist's universe hovers on a razor-edge between a sophisticated design space, futurist film set, chill out lounge, and art work...Indeed, the work seems to deliberately wish to confuse the boundaries between such different territories and contexts.

In the end, Beatriz Barral simply lures the spectator inside paintings of the most contemporary kind. Thoroughly abstract in their use of forms and surfaces and thoroughly non-abstract in both their use of architecture, design devices, and the very same surfaces that could otherwise be construed as abstract.