Rafa Macarrón is a self-taught artist whose works meld playful drawing and figuration with striking, chromatic abstraction. Macarrón’s work plays with bodies, particularly ones with manifold fingers, thin-lined limbs, and hyper-distorted facial features. Trained as a physiotherapist, he works with a comprehensive understanding of anatomy, only to rebuke its precision. His canvases comprise a field of playfulness, a space for mutation. Macarrón’s corruptions of scientific anatomy are at once spirited and macabre, similar to the figures in Picasso’s Guernica. His dreamlike aesthetic brings a popular-cultural sensibility--one informed by various media such as comics and cartoons--to a style of abstract figuration exemplified by painters such as Paul Klee, Arshile Gorky, and Jean Dubuffet. These characters exist in two types of landscapes: in some works, Macarrón emphasizes a sense of isolation, positioning the figures in textured color fields; and in other works, he makes them bustle in overcrowded worlds filled with absurdist infrastructures.
