↳ Exhibitions

Fiona Mackay and Damaris Pan at CIBRIÁN

June 20, 2021

Artists: Fiona Mackay, Damaris Pan

Exhibition title: Sugaar

Venue: CIBRIÁN, San Sebastian, Spain

Date: April 16 – June 26, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and CIBRIÁN, San Sebastian

Sugaar is a little known, hardly ever represented being from Basque mythology. He is part of the oral history, omnipresent in this culture. Sugaar su (fire) garra (flame) appears, among other things, as a half moon of fire waving in the sky. He is a harbinger of a storm to come. As a myth he belongs to a non-historical time but shows himself every Friday in bad weather. The interesting thing about Sugaar is his irrelevance. Indeed, the few people who know his story will tell it in very different ways.Such as Sugaar, painting must be unimportant. This is the only possible way so that it is not coercive; both myth and painting have embodied moral precepts for a long time.

At CIBRIÁN, the work of Fiona Mackay and Damaris Pan unfolds freely in space responding to Leon Battista Alberti’s extraordinary statement: What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of a wave.

This reveals the ambivalence of the surface as flatness and depth, and introduce the idea of movement.

Fiona Mackay (b.1984) shows fabric dye on canvas. The diluted dye is applied as a membrane whose shapes echoes the sensitive world, evoking a scene through a window, for instance. This membrane can be distorted, stretched, creating dreamlike environment. Like a skin, it is both a cover and an opening to the world. The porosity of Fiona Mackay’s painting creates “a sensual, tactile, voluptuous and emotional experience”.

The work of Damaris Pan (b.1983) is a balance between various ways of painting. She covers with thick paint, wipes off then recreates a perfect edge out of nowhere. The artist uses color and form as overlapping slabs that seem to slowly build the foundation of a figuration that comes and goes. Her work is infused with a certain sense of the absurd and humor. The back and forth between the gesture and its restraint encapsulates the very moment when forms arise.