Spanish artist Carmen Sotuela paints her alternately exotic and allegorical subjects in beautifully textured, color-saturated impressionist brushstrokes that bring her Andalusian landscapes to lush, vivid life. Her subjects range from snippets of rural life to spectacular symbolist compositions. Images of farmers and agricultural land have a lived-in familiarity and underline issues of injustice and inequality. Meanwhile, metaphorical canvases portray eerily beautiful environments in peril, much like our own.
Sotuela paints every scene with astounding verve, applying her bold oil tones in sharp, thick brushstrokes that catch the light to create stunning shading effects. In so doing she makes everyday details leap from the canvas, and symbolic scenes take on an air of fantasy. Her palette abounds in powerful colors, from Andalusia’s verdant flowers and trees to unnatural, glowing hues that cast her allegorical paintings in otherworldly lights. This use of strong colors in the arresting foregrounds of her paintings permits incredible depth, so that the world of Sotuela’s enveloping canvases seems to extend beyond the bright horizon.