biography

 

Carmen Redondo was born in Madrid in 1971. Being very young, she began painting self-taught and, when she was a teenager, begins to take classes with different teachers.

 

At 19, she began studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts (Complutense University of Madrid), where she graduated. During the course of her career gets different scholarships (with the painter Daniel Quintero- Summer Courses of the Universidad Complutense of Madrid- and the painter Luis Garcia-Ochoa, in El Escorial, Madrid)

At the same time, she made sets and signage work for plays and illustrations for the Cd and the book of poems "The Dream of the Navigator” (Enfasis Records 1995)

 

After completing her degree in 1996, she moved to Los Angeles, California, USA, where she exhibited her work at several galleries.

 

On her return to Spain, she moved to Madrid and continued with an intense production, primarily oil painting and drawing, combining teaching with the participation of new  exhibitions:

 

SOLO EXHIBITIONS: "Retrospective" (Espacio Arte con Valores, Valdepielagos, Madrid 2019)  /  "Al Reves/A Rebours/ Inside Out" (Rearte Gallery, Vienna (Austria) 2016 / "Fragments of Reality" (Palacio Gaviria, Madrid 2006) / "Internal Fragments" (Galeria Espacio Guia, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 2005) / "De Profundis" (Galeria Nela Alberca, Madrid 2003) / “Sin Titulo” (MD Art Gallery, Tres Cantos, Madrid 1999) /  “Espacio para el Arte” (Fundacion Caja Madrid, Alcala de Henares, Madrid  1999) / “At the Beginning” (Anastasia´s Assylum, Santa Monica, Los Ángeles, USA 1997)

 

GROUP EXHIBITIONS: Faculty of Fine Arts, Complutense University, Madrid, 1995.

 

GALLERY DEPOSIT: In the United States at Morpheus Galerie (Beverly Hills, Los Angeles 1997-99), Art Ambience Gallery (West Hollywood, LA 1997),  Pat McGann Gallery (West Hollywood, LA 1997). In Spain, MD Art Gallery (1999- 2001) and Espacio Guia (2005- 2006).

 

GRAPHIC WORKS: Illustrations in the book “Why destiny put this book on your hands” by Chema Vilchez (2016). Cd covers and logos for several Chema Vilchez´s musical works, the last ones “The Land of the 3 Cultures” (2011) and “Unity” (2013). Illustrations and photographs in the book "Yoga, Reborn to Life" by Chema Vilchez (Editorial Sepha 2005), book cover in the book "The Recaptured Wisdom" by Monica Cavalle (Ediciones Oberon- Grupo Anaya 2002) and “The Book of Relaxation and Tranquility” by Ramiro Calle (Ediciones Jaguar 2002).

 

 

Currently, she works and develops various thematic projects, and she is preparing new exhibitions to be held in the coming years.

about

 

"Carmen Redondo´s remarkable paintings exude a powerful sense of mystery and mood, senses which are sorely lacking in most of today´s art. Her style is a reminiscent of the best master- works from the rich Symbolist period of the nineteenth century.

Her paintings convey strong feelings of loneliness and longing, as well as a sense of being lost amidst strange surroundings. This is no a practitioner of the merely decorative, but an introspective explorer into realms of the beautifully strange and haunting"

 

MORPHEUS INTERNATIONAL
JAMES R. COWAN. President
GALERIE MORPHEUS.
Beverly Hills, California, E.E.U.U.

 

 

 

 

"Carmen Redondo, born in Madrid, Spain, brings her mystic images on canvas to Los Angeles, California. She seeks to decipher the significance of dimensions in architecture, landscapes and people; and then presents her interpretation of these images, she portrays on canvas what she believes that she sees, the representation leaves an impression of the object on the scene to be further translated by the viewer.

Carmen works magic with her utilization of light and dark, a style of chiaroscuro that not only states the effect of a third dimension but places the architecture and the person in a setting. She, also, uses light and darks to depict a drama to be viewed and then translated by the viewer from his specific known/ unknown knowledge.

The architecture is moody and at times monumental whereas the human elements are enigmatic or lost in their surroundings, the viewer must wonder not only what is occurring, but also, what the individuals are experiencing. Carmen is indeed a symbolist painter of the XXI Century. Are we living in a world too infinite to comprehend- while seeing ourselves as unable, or too finite to grasp!! “

 

 

ART AMBIENCE GALLERY
ROBERT JOSEPH SPEAKER. Director
Los Angeles, California, E.E.U.U.

 

 

 

 

“Carmen Redondo as an artist has the ability to act as a medium between the everyday world in which most people wanders and a metaphysical and transcendent universe full of wisdom and mystery. As a painter, despite her youth, she has the wealth and manners of a great teacher, but her insight is so advanced that her paintings, beyond being excellent visual representations, become a true revelation of consciousness.

Her works not only reveal her unquestionable artistic talent, but will capture a unique and original pictorial universe, intense and deep. Contemplation of her work becomes a journey into the intangible, opening our senses to a world as real as unknown. Her intensely personal style has a large, often overwhelming, expressive power.”

 

CHEMA VILCHEZ. Musician

 

 

 

 

"Since Andy Warhol convinced critics and much of the public that his series, reproduced ad infinitum, were the quintessence of post-modernity, the iteration has been entrenched in the world of painting masking the lack of passion and authenticity that characterizes the art of the last quarter century and the beginning of this one.

By enrolling in this poor reality which is a current trend,-where all facts are re-iterated without limits in the media, including news and insignificant anecdotes -, artists, once the rebel fire of creation has been extinguished by the influence of fads imposed by trade flows, have succumbed to this situation which is a consequence imposed by technological development. The reason is simple: they just should pursue the achievement of a painting. This equates to having today an almost infinite number of pictures. That is, a painting is equivalent to "having work" when, in fact, having work is the result of an absolute dedication to painting over a lifetime. Having found the matrix painting, the alleged artist will change each of the subsequent works to maintain his individuality, ie to collect it as unique piece! The buyer does not care about this detail. Usually he ignores what a finished work is, closed in itself. He has enough acquiring a signature and a painting that responds within the iteration, to the matrix that characterizes its author, who becomes, somehow, in something like a commercial logo. Thus, the current average buyer, referring to the purchase of a painting, another person claims to have acquired the same way that boasts of buying a watch alluding only to the brand name (one..). Serialization passes for uniqueness. Never mind that the picture is cloned, replicated, abducted by its owner! What matters is that it bears his signature or his logo.

There’s no reason to object against serial work when it responds to the appropriate technique. There are in fact reproduction means to serialize art such as engravings or serigraphs. Even printing that bridles at the books, for example, pictorial realities otherwise closed to the majority. The fraud is in "series" paintings carried out with individualistic and autonomous techniques like oil. The devil lies in the lack of truth that has come to conquer plots until recently guarded by the most indomitable artists.

However, there are still artists who have chosen to continue along the path of authenticity and inspiration everyday, conquered against all odds, despite the advantages the painting market generously offers to impostors. Carmen Redondo in this line deserves to be highlighted with admiration and emphasis. Without the slightest crack, she embodies the paradigm artist who gives meaning to her work through a position of absolute honesty before her life and her easel. Each of Carmen Redondo’s paintings is a quest, an adventure, a road. It is a trail that runs through getting surprised every moment with the unknown that arises in the mind, the heart and on the canvas. But it is not Carmen Redondo´s pictorial exploration a labyrinthine space that could lead to the absurd. No. There lies her particularity. While she searches for an unknown horizon and at first sight each work seems to be addressed to a vague destination, the outcome is very clear. Because the direction Carmen Redondo prints in each work invariably leads to the essential. We know this when we look at her paintings, peacefully.

An artist endowed with a great painterly technique. Her work, however, deliberately detests useless ornamentation; she does not hesitate to restrict her palette, and often resolves spaces with flat inks and very expressive spots that she surprisingly combines with lines that move us to areas which are beyond the canvas. Some strokes, on purpose unfinished, remind us of oriental signs which, due to their simplicity place the viewer at the heart of the moment of their birth; In a continuous present that the viewer glimpses in an unconscious way, but that makes his perception of time shift while watching the work excitedly. On other occasions Carmen Redondo hurries brushstrokes, polishes the work, and gives us scenes of old roots, full of harmony, and inside which are reflective beings absorbed by the universe in which they are immersed without knowing why, and to which they seem to wish to remove her secret by dint of silence.

I also want to highlight in her paintings the rigorous role reserved to the wonder that is a constant in the characters portrayed by Carmen Redondo. In fact it is her own bewilderment, but transferred to the protagonists of her paintings. It is not a naive amazement but, instead, that of a wise woman who senses that every possible explanation applied to the spectacle of the world is nothing but a futile attempt to quell doubts about the unfathomable mystery that surrounds us and which we are!

Carmen Redondo does not paint the world. She could hardly be a painter of realistic workmanship. If anything a symbolist or surrealist. She paints the way we represent the world as we remember, dream and ponder, alone, from a penumbral state of mind. She does not offer it as is presented before our eyes with all its colorful splendor and fanfare, as this demonstration, within the conceptual framework of Carmen Redondo, is merely the expression of a deeper dream than our dreams at night: a basic illusory perception that the Hindus call Maya.

Carmen Redondo's paintings arise from the memory of a hidden truth that she pursues vigorously. It starts from a deep longing to go into the unfathomable.

I presume that her pictorial adventure, thankfully, will never end. Along the way her brushes point she will find thousands of answers, but the natural wonder that can have more than any passenger stilling and will give her new flights to keep painting, frame by frame, towards the infinity of herself "

 

BENIGNO MORILLA. Writer