Marisu Solís: Color, Memory, and Freedom in Contemporary Spanish Painting
By And-Art Works Magazine
The Asturian painter Marisu Solís (Avilés, Spain 1957) has built throughout her career a profoundly personal artistic language, positioning herself as a distinctive voice within contemporary Spanish art. Her painting is recognized for its intensity of color, the strength of gesture, and a constant balance between abstract painting and symbolic representation. All of this makes her an essential artist for those seeking authenticity and character in the world of art collecting.
Solís’s story has been connected to painting since childhood. Her Cuban grandmother, also a painter, was her first artistic reference within the family, leaving a decisive legacy: an understanding of art as both intimate expression and a language of freedom. This foundation was enriched by summers by the sea in Bañuges and excursions to the Picos de Europa, experiences that shaped her bond with landscape and nature. Years later, these elements would appear in her canvases, transformed into autonomous visual signs.
Her training at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando coincided with Spain’s democratic transition and the cultural explosion of the Movida Madrileña, a period of openness that defined her artistic approach: bold, free, and in dialogue with pictorial tradition. From Cezanne to Matisse, from Jawlensky to German Expressionism, from Sorolla to Fortuny, and later from Alechinsky to American Abstract Expressionism, her work embraces a vast legacy reinterpreted through a contemporary lens. Yet her painting is neither quotation nor imitation: it is vital synthesis and personal exploration.
A Pictorial Language in Transformation
The landscape, which in her early works functioned as a naturalistic framework, has gradually lost its descriptive weight to become a structure of signs, grids, and graphic marks that organize the composition. Houses, trees, and horizons are no longer recognizable settings but visual codes that vibrate like the lead lines of a stained glass window or the weave of a tapestry. This oscillation between the real and the abstract is one of the hallmarks of her style.
Collage has taken on a central role in her most recent series. Far from being a superficial addition, it is a resource that introduces spatial ruptures while simultaneously unifying the composition, linking colors and gestures. Through this, Solís opens her painting toward a freer territory, close to the gestural energy of the CoBrA Movement and the chromatic synthesis of De Staël.
Her color palette, once dominated by grays and blues, now expands into vibrant tones: saturated pinks, deep reds, luminous greens. Colors that not only intensify the visual impact but also carry emotional resonance, connecting with memory, vitality, and the pursuit of freedom.
Aesthetic Critique: Color as a Vital Territory
The work of Marisu Solís is not limited to formal experimentation; it is also a reflection on color in art as a vital experience. Her brushstroke, compact and decisive, at times becomes broken, gestural, even ornamental, creating a rhythm that moves between tension and lyricism. In her paintings, the expressive force of gesture coexists with a delicate chromatic intimacy, achieving a balance that generates vibrant surfaces open to the viewer’s interpretation.
For contemporary art collecting, Solís’s painting represents a solid choice: a body of work nourished by both tradition and modernity, rooted in personal and cultural heritage yet imbued with a universal spirit. Each canvas is a space of memory and freedom, a meeting point between the intimate and the external.
Today, Marisu Solís stands as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Spanish painting. Her career demonstrates that art is not only about technique or style but also biography, heritage, and emotion translated into color. For collectors, admirers of abstract painting, and those drawn to emerging contemporary art, her work offers what is most valuable: authenticity, strength, and an unmistakable chromatic vibration.
