Xabier Sáenz de Gorbea - Art as destiny

María Alonso Páez took up the brush as a child. She was an artist all life lomg, though painting became her profession Only in adulthood. She never makes even short breaks in her work, and can be found in her Studio every day.

Her biography resembles lives of many artists who left their initial profession to entirely dedicate themselves to art- suffice into mention Paul Gauguin or Vasily Kandinsky, who gave up legal practice and university professorship.

When you firmly determine to take up art, you dedicate your all to trailblazing experiments and an endless quest.Such people entirely change their needs, demands and aspirations. Infinite knowledge is what they are alter, María Alonso Páez is tremendous siccess. She Stripes to do as much as she can, and as quickly as possible, in art, which she sees as a boundless ocean of the unknown. She is creating an amotional universe that owes its psychological tension to a telluric inner power linking her with the worl around.

María took up abstract art to embark on research and experiment. She made sketch after sketch to compare them and choose the best. She was doing more than it appeared possible. Feverish quest made her dissolve in art. She entered a stormy sea of feelings and sensations,now rejoicing,now sufering in her creative drive.

The power of her expressive ductus is amazing. María burns with passion, and her artistic courage is limitless. She wants to feel what defies feeling. She has put up with her fate as it leads her to wonderful adventures that have a beginning but no end. She cannot plan and forecast, When you choose a destiny as hers, you just walk ahead, and then retreat only to set on another journey-a journey of no destination. You never know when you will attain your goal. When such stormy life leaves you utterly exhausted, you say to your self, "I've had enough", as your intuition bids you. Now, it is up to intuition to decide whether you ought to go on to the end. Next comes the turn of reason. You examine your way from long and short distances. The combat with fate goes on, day after day. You always find a pretext to add something to a canvas- a brushstroke here and there. Sometimes, it leads to a totally different painting, with a new texture.

The limits of creativity are extremely vague. María Alonso Páez depicts the void and solitude of stars and minerals. Concentrating in the heart of the world are clusters of sprinkles and sparkling, cracking eruptions. The traces they leave on the surface have a magnetic power. The viewer's eye is glued to them as he re-appraises his entire self.

María removes the boundary between the abstract and the figurative. She has no use for a particular style, She shuns plastic super-autonomy,never uses a meta-language, and never imitates anyone. Through hint and mediated narration, she brings together random incidents and controllable facts. She borrows the energy of realistic traces to produce an alloy of something defying words. A solid texture appears as she gathers twinkling light spots.

Now, the transformation is over. Matter comes to a state that prompts imagination. That is how the artist produces stimuli appearing out of nowhere to make one attentively examine the ficticious environment. Ethereal light, stormy elements, the shining of fire and the lava of a volcanic eruption- all join in a plastic body filled with spirit. Dominating this animate cluster is the feeling of chaos, which the artist invented and brought into order. The matter, shape and colour all come as harbingers of a hypnotic instant that settles everything. The artist is a medium laping into the precipice to be translated into another state.

By Xabier Sáenz de Gorbea
Art Critic
Professor of Art History Of the Basque Country University
The Course in the latest artistic trends