Jose Antonio Ibanez de Garayo

Maria creates an ever-lasting melody, unique and enchanting. It finds expression in structureless forms at odds with whatever logic. Underlying those forms, however, are scenes that abound in instants from personal experience, emotional and thoroughly pondered.

Her painting has the magnetic power of proper painting. It is convincing and complicated art – art beyond all doubt, whose rich texture comes as firm proof of an atmosphere full of sensuality and mercy. As it unfolds before our eye it carries us into another world, new, intricate, intuitive and palpitating.

Doubt is past. Now, an inner storm is rising to saturate the canvases with questions that take the bizarre form of fierce power defying imagination. However, I find not the shapes deserving interest, however numerous and diverse they may be, but the reality that lies deep within – a reality full of poetic sonority, which explodes silence to lift the veil over the enigma of the shapes, colours and their subtle shades as a breeze that rocks the distance between tiny spots of light.

The quiet starlit night is willing to envelop the viewer as he merges with it in his search for the tuneful light to carry him into unknown worlds. Those worlds laugh, sing and dance, joining in a fiery alloy with the sonorous tune Maria offers in her works.

Always industrious and persevering, never to put up with the slightest drawback in her art, she is impatient on her never-ending over and over again, never sparing of her strength, paints and varnish, prompted by the wondrous power that drives her to create shape and colour, and leads her to finished compositions full of expression and balance.

The art of Maria Alonso Paez rests on the principle of balance expressed through austere and moderate shapes and colours, destined to coexist all through their long and tortuous road as the expressive, impulsive colour blends in with the noble and melodious formal structure. Her art makes it all possible. The colour casts off its veil of mystery to bow to enriching craftsmanship and virtuosity of creating forms. Vast and full of grandeur, her canvases reflect the infinite cosmos to make the viewer feel part of what he sees.

Maria´s paintings are a symphony wrapped in the gentle harmonious colours of the Universe as they swish sparkling by the infinity of space. Her art is research and intuition in one. Blended together, they triumph within non-formalist laws saturated with a tension that makes every difficult task easy.

Hers are conscious movements born within to bring concreteness to all that creates the romantic, emotional harmony of her paintings.

I enjoy at her works, with the truthful, sincere idiom in which they express everything around. I make an attempt to enter the complicated world of those canvases –and feel it is hard to enter it for they all reflect true stories refracted in the light of imagination as it plays with past experience. No doubt, when I spend some time before those canvases, my mind opens to the truth of life as depicted in them, and listens with attention to the numerous chords that make the melody of her symphony.

Maria seeks to express what she makes according to her own techniques. She is success as her works stand in contrast to the general contest. They are outside the stage we all share, and outside whatever historical semblance.

To achieve that, she recurred to all means of attaining verisimilitude –the means that would be as implacable as the first herself. She never listens to sirens ‘songs lest she relax. She bravely demonstrates her virtues, which she envelopes in shiny masses of colour and feeling that gives her paintings their inimitable energy.

Her canvases are in between the analytic and the synthetic. They lead to instinctive liberation from art professors ‘dogmas. Only spontaneous paintings can aspire to be great works –paintings that express profound knowledge and the domination of colour and texture. It cost endless struggle with those colours and textures to acquire such knowledge. That is the real creative and experimental expressionist poetry, which Maria´s strength and enthusiasm rule.

The idea of her art as linked with the essence of Nature dominates Maria´s everyday efforts, and finds expression in her intuition in a hard toil leading to the desired result. She is her own element, in a world all her own, and she sets her own laws to staunchly follow them. She is full of concern about the mysteries of the universe, with its stars, fluidity and unknown heroes. All that makes her paintings stand apart. As we look at them, we have the impression of seeing not everything there is to them. We feel that much of what we have before our very eyes is mere fruit of our own imagination.

Jose Antonio Ibanez de Garayo

President of the Faustino Orbegozo Eizaguirre Foundation

President of the institute of Arts an humanities

Art Critic and Gallerist