Mònica Subidé
Mònica Subidé lives and works in Barcelona, where she studied drawing at the Centre d'Art Massana and started painting on her own in her parents' garage. Even now, drawing is what she returns to when she feels lost. Her figures and flowers, painted in oil and pencil, look back to the early 1900s, when she feels painting reached its greatest intensity. Each show takes its title from a period of her life. I Don't Walk, I Fly, for example, came out of the two years she spent living in isolation in a forest. Flowers, she says, "are a sigh of hope." She is now working on a show in Los Angeles for 2027.
Q: You studied at Massana in Barcelona in the 1990s. How did you come to painting?
A: I studied drawing. For four years I worked mainly with charcoal, cardboard boxes, and the live model. That is my foundation.
I had a studio in my parents' garage, and that was where I began painting on my own. It was already a very solitary practice. I never felt particularly interested in going to a school or having a teacher teach me how to paint; I liked finding my own way.
I have devoted many hours to drawing, and it is a practice I love deeply. Painting, on the other hand, has always been something spiritually more complex for me. Drawing is the practice I return to when I feel lost; it is my centre. But really, I never came to painting. It was always there. You don't arrive at it—it is with you; it becomes part of you.
Q: Your paintings look like they could have been made in Paris or Barcelona in 1906. Where does that come from?
A: For me, that was a period when painting reached its greatest intensity. Not because I want to recreate that historical moment, but because I recognise in it a way of understanding painting that still moves me deeply.
I am interested in painting that makes you feel without needing to narrate anything; painting that does not tell a story beyond the story of the painting itself. I am interested in the moment when a form, a colour, or a figure can contain an emotion without having to describe it. Perhaps that is why my paintings can seem outside of time. I am not trying to make contemporary painting in the sense of reflecting the present.
I am more interested in searching for what remains, for something that can exist independently of its time. I think that is also what I am looking for in my own painting: that the image does not end with what it represents.
Q: How do line and colour work together in your paintings?
A: It is a complicated subject. Until recently, colour defined the line, but for some time now I have been trying to break that relationship. It is something that constantly pulls me towards the abyss.
I love geometry and the simplicity of forms, but I also love colour, which in itself has no line. It is infinite until it encounters another colour or a line.
In every painting I try to break the line, to go beyond the limit. I achieve this more easily in the smaller paintings, although I feel that I am slowly moving forward with the larger ones too.
Kandinsky is a perfect example for me: a painting somewhere between figuration and abstraction, where the communion of forms and the spirituality of the work create something unique and unrepeatable.
Q: Your flowers look almost like limbs next to the figures. How did they become part of your work?
A: How could we live in a world without flowers?
Imagine a world without them.
Flowers are a sigh of hope.
Q: I Don't Walk, I Fly, Teresa's Wings, El deseo de ser ciervo. Where do your titles come from?
A: My titles usually speak about the moment in life I am going through. Life and painting go hand in hand, and my painting is constantly changing because I am constantly changing too. And perhaps even more so as a woman. Women are constantly moving internally; we are emotionally very complex, and it is inevitable that this movement finds its way into the painting.
I always choose the title of one of the paintings in an exhibition as the title of the show—the one that best represents a particular period, a year of my life. In this way, the title of a painting also becomes the title of an exhibition. Titles have a history.
La mujer que llora corresponds to a year when I cried a lot, a year that was hormonally very intense. I Don't Walk, I Fly referred to the two years I spent living in isolation in the forest. After that experience, I felt I no longer needed to walk, because I could fly.
Q: You've shown from Barcelona to New York to Taipei. What are you working on now?
A: I am currently working towards an exhibition in Los Angeles, planned for 2027.
