The Fundació Arranz Bravo presents "Cangeles" by Michael Lawton

The Arranz Bravo Foundation presents on September 15, as part of Bcn Gallery Weekend, the exhibition Cangeles by Michael Lawton, which can be visited until November 20, 2022.

Cangeles is an artistic project by Michael Lawton (1980, Sheffield, United Kingdom), which hybridizes pictorial practice and writing. Lawton naturally alternates between both disciplines, but in Cangeles he has worked on them simultaneously for the first time.

This is a long-term project, started in September 2019 as part of a residency at Hangar, and developed during the first pandemic confinement. Lawton then began writing a fictional novel (Cangeles Book One: The Map Makers), which for the present exhibition he has condensed into 10 short chapters. The text is framed in a fictional suburban town, in which the author describes powerful visual images that he is interested in narrating: an abandoned barn, a ruined field, a library full of life, a greenhouse, an imaginary marriage bond, a flooding of a laboratory... Scenes and impressions that Lawton transfers onto the pictorial canvas, through a celebratory, fiery and vital style. Despite the speculative appearance of his story, Michael Lawton is an artist who wants to reflect on the world today.

The author considers that it is in the suburbs of the big cities where the contemporary world comes into play, through the intersection of a rich multiplicity of natural, technological and cultural realities. Lawton absorbs all these situations pictorially through forms and bright chromaticisms with which the painter, from a utopian and optimistic attitude, wants to represent the atmospheres of our artificial and pixelated world. At bottom, his artistic work is an answer to an existential question: “OK, here we are. And now what?”