Estrada

Adolfo Estrada’s (Buenos Aires, 1942) studio, designed by him in a bucolic Ampurdanese setting, is of an austere simplicity; a large rectangular room with a loft, almost without windows to the beautiful landscape outside. Estrada has chosen for his environment an elemental space devoid of ornaments that would distract his rigid, ascetic, self-imposed solitude, where he creates images reduced to a most fundamental vocabulary of colour, line and the quadrilateral in space.Adolfo Estrada's early training as an architect informs the constructivist aesthetic of his paintings, "my painting is construction," he adds, "when I sculpt I also construct."  His works are patiently created with multiple layers of oil paint that are patiently sanded until all trace of the artist is lost, brush stroke, painterly gesture or pictorial reference, leaving us with elegant compositions that become meditative spaces of intense depth, evoking a not-accidental comparison to certain compositions by Malevich and the Russian Constructivists as well as the icons and devotional ex-votos of Andrei Rublyev.