Keenly aware that painting is the most highly saturated discipline of all the visual arts, for Montón the challenge lies in perpetuating its currency as a valid form of contemporary expression. To this end, she pours into the creative process all the impulses and drives that engage, unsettle and move her in the act of addressing images. These take the form of obsessions, of non-rationalised imperatives, because it is only when she starts to work with them that she can get actually to grips with them and follow their traces. The decisions she takes at this stage are generally of a formal nature, though underpinned by an express desire to disassociate them from the idea of a personal style. As such, the work is the outcome of its own internal process of development as it dictates its own path, thus postponing the meditative and analytic action until the process is already well under way.

The desire to open up the familiar through the discovery of new, different parameters and thus stir up the vestiges of prior experiences, places the starting point of these recent works at a crossroads of contingencies that can be summed up in her conscientious examination, somewhere between outrage and use value, of what is for her the obscene representation of The Rape of the Sabine Women. Yet it is not to undertake an exercise in appropriation nor the operation implicit in those paraphrases that reinterpret references to the past and take them to their own personal language. Instead, these are more freer versions, exempt from underlining, in which she sometimes takes printed fragments of paintings from art history in a double play in which she uses yet at once paints over them. In this case however she handles the sensual flesh of Rubens intuitively, transforming, distorting and destroying it. Cutting perpendicularly across this approach is a reading of Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, which, besides throwing light on eternal themes that have marked the imaginary of the West, also describes the vicissitudes in the transit from matriarchy to patriarchy. The combination of both interpretations produces an outcome with some aspects that could be associated with the baroque. These include, among others, a vision of the world giving expression to the disorder that overwhelms us, an abundance of dynamic forms in tension, a certain tendency towards theatricalising scenes, a taste for artifice and ornamentation, an inclination towards certain “oddities” or rule-breaking, a highly tactile and physical poetics, a strong ideological charge, and again a curious double play underlying surface appearances in which rigorous construction is coupled with evident chaos. And that is without forgetting the titles, which in these works evoke clearly unmistakable content and go beyond a mere reformulation of prior periods. The inclusion of works made between 2005 and 2007 evinces a correspondence with her current output in terms of the treatment of the scenes, with a powerful symbolic component gravitating over both.

With these “theatres of life”, at once instances of a culture of the image, Idoia Montón Gorostegui takes another step forward in her practice, but above all else she reaffirms her courageous, risk-taking and prejudice-free temperament. She repeats the leap into the unknown that she took, for instance, in the transition to a crude realism dismantling conventional cannons around twenty years ago. But now she takes this step at a moment of painterly maturity to show us how she sees the world.