TIME STOPPED AT THE GUGGEMHEIM MUSEUM

Bernabé Fernández Llana has been working his way in the world of professional art through the practice of figurative painting, mainly devoting his art to urban, railroad and industrial landscapes.

Alone in the Museum (Guggenheim NYC) (2006), winner of the recently awarded VI Junta General del Principado of Asturias Painting Award 2006, belongs to the artist's new series. The oil painting portrays an inside passage at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the charismatic building created by Mark Lloyd Wright, in which a lonely visitor is painted in backlight.

Bernabé Fernández represents the spectacular curved shapes inside the building in a photo-based framing and through a well thought and highly dynamic shape layout that, in accordance to the golden rule of art, places a hypnotic stability point and an attraction focus in the head of the character.

The contrasted intensity of light in the image, with an area in semi-darkness and another heavily lit area, contributes to the active and powerful definition of the space.

Alone in the Museum (Guggenheim NYC) (2006) and some other works inside the same collection, such as Last Visitor (2006) or Guggenheim NYC (2006), that the artist painted taking the actual American centre as a model, are amongst his best. All these pieces, heirs to the old art of cabinet painting, show a highly detailed technical propriety and, in most cases, aim for the suggestive effect of the painting within the painting.

Just as it happened with Federico González Granell's piece chosen for this same exhibit, there is a shroud of mystery and suspense concomitant to the works of Edward Cooper.

The asturian artist invites us to reflect upon the role of big museums nowadays, gigantic 'temples' in which memory and knowledge go hand in hand with showbusiness and consumerism.