Carla Cascales

Carla Cascales work comprises drawings, paintings and sculptures that lead us to a minimalist aesthetic influenced by architectural trends such as Brutalism. Likewise, the lure of the Japanese aesthetics of Wabi-Sabi infuses her work with a fascination for the concept of beauty based on irregularity and impermanence. This Japanese term originated from an austere and restricted form of appreciation; however, today it embraces a more relaxed acceptance of transience, melancholy and nature, making way for imperfection and incompleteness in everything from architecture to ceramics.

Cascales has a background in design and communication but over the years her work has evolved towards a contemporary art movement. Her beginnings as a designer are still apparent in her paintings, in the balance of form and purity of composition, in which all the elements have their place, without ornamentation, contrasting their irregularities and imperfections with the austerity of the forms.

Cascales work is a constant aesthetic quest for the essence and balance of organic materials such as wood, linen, stone, ceramics, in which precisely by removing elements their essence is discovered, with none of the poetry lost, as though laying bare a painting.

Another of her fascinations is the female body s combination of delicacy and strength, the roundness of its forms, the capacity to contain abstracts that represent movement and that become paintings.

Cascales uses natural and neutral colours, colours that we can find in nature, in all her work. She often makes her own pigments using organic materials or oxide minerals. Colour is merely an accompaniment to texture, which is the really important and remarkable part of her work.

One of Carla Cascales great inspirations, always present one way or another in her work, is the Mediterranean: its spirit, the sparkle of its waves, the texture of the foam, the breeze on summer nights, its tranquillity but also ferocity, the simple but pleasant life, the change of seasons, the waters that are calm by day and deep by night.

Carla Cascales has had solo exhibitions in Barcelona, Madrid, London and Los Angeles; and art installations in institutions such as Matadero Madrid or La Caixa ImaginCafé in Barcelona. She has also taken part in art residencies in San Francisco in 2017, Florence in 2018 and Tokyo in 2019.