The exhibition presented jointly at their venues in Leon and Gijon by the galleries Armaga (gallery that represents her since 1999) and Espacio Liquid, in collaboration with Madrid’s La Gran, brings together works from Teresa Gancedo’s most recent stage. A stage that begins in the nineties. From this decade onwards, her painting becomes more vital, her palette becomes clearer -still preserving her characteristic grisaille-, she works very often in modular series and Gancedo’s personal way of seeing the world and capturing it in paint is affirmed. The works of this decade are usually organized by symmetrical axes, incorporating collages or drawings, and the paintings acquire a freedom and personality that would become evident in his future career. Using plastic resources of symbolism and mysticism, he delves into his personal memory and the collective psyche through signs and symbols such as religious images, popular or art history, plant elements, flowers, birds and fish -sometimes incorporating images and found objects- and a whole panoply of seemingly decorative elements, honeycombed, filigree and organic forms that make the mysticism and asceticism of his work is accompanied by sensuality and hedonism.
In general, his production focuses on the exercise of a very particular painting, although it also includes objects, drawings, engravings, installations and even interventions in the functional elements and furniture of some houses such as that of Juana Almirall, one of his most loyal collectors, in Granollers. This diversity of expressive means employed have in common not only an attitude and an aesthetic, but also the incorporation of humble everyday elements that he integrates into the works and with which he forges a creative universe as personal as it is universal and as simple as it is powerful.
Teresa Gancedo takes painting back to its origin, not so much because of the primitivist or Romanesque references in her work, which there are, but above all because of the impulse and function of these paintings, which are linked to expressive, magical and religious needs related to human concerns linked to animist, sympathetic, votive or propitiatory rites: fertility, food, attraction of beneficial natural forces, harmony with the divinity, spiritual well-being, salutary actions, vital benefits of all kinds, etcetera.
Therefore, Gancedo’s work is full of references and evocations, memories, resonances and invocations of some of the vital and aesthetic experiences of his childhood in a village in the mountains of León. All of this appears in his work until it is charged and tinged by his particular vision, which is full of vitalistic, intimate and even melancholic lyricism.
[Adapted from the text by Manuel Olveira on the occasion of Teresa Gancedo’s exhibition at MUSAC (2018)].
