Rafa Macarrón 

Lio Malca and Doriano Navarra are delighted to present the first Parisian exhibition of Rafa Macarrón, an emergent artist from the Spanish contemporary scene, showcasing a selection of new paintings and works on paper.

Born in 1981 in Madrid, where he continues to live and work, this self-taught artist developed his artistic education from a young age as he regularly visited the Prado Museum. He admires the Spanish painters, from Diego Velázquez to El Paso Group and Pablo Picasso, but is also influenced by artistic movements including the New Figuration, American Abstract Expressionism, and Cubism. 

His complex artworks mix various media, each of which has a specific use for Macarrón: “The spray gives modernity, dynamism, and color. The pencils and the marker create the weft, the waxes, the acrylics and the gouaches, nuanced transparencies, and the oil brings complexity.” In his 2D universes, he uses plain and flat backgrounds to highlight the figure and give it more prominence. Macarrón also explores color variations to create different atmospheres. While his strokes seem very immediate and direct, he always works from sketches and studies.

The exhibition at Galerie 75 Faubourg presents both large portraits, emphasizing the direct contact with the public, and panoramas in which dozens of characters mingle. Very colorful, his works are peopled with characters as unique as universal, creating scenes that seem out of time in an unknown world. Rafa Macarrón, therefore, invites the viewer to imagine the story of these figures, as he does when creating them: who are they? Where are they coming from, and where are they going? The artist explains, “they are born from a fantastic, surreal, and expressionist figuration. I consider them hybrid characters that are closely related to my admiration for Dubuffet, Bonifacio, and Alfonso Fraile.” Macarrón takes people from his daily life, decontextualizing and deforming them, to create his own creatures using the human anatomy knowledge he acquired during his physiotherapy studies. The artist uses street atmospheres and scenes of everyday life as a prism of humorous and compassionate existential exploration, inviting the audience to ponder alterative interpretations of reality.