Domestic landscapes

Miki Leal's work is characterized by the way she explores, resignifies and submits to complex displacements a wide repertoire of forms, signs, symbols and cultural objects. Throughout his career, he has developed a dense and coherent creative project that combines the recovery of genres, media, images and references from the past with a fertile and inventive iconography of his own. Historicism and eclecticism are fundamental pillars of his work, as well as the use of irony and allegory, or the fluid transit between high and low culture that also defines him.

With the pictorial practice as the axis, he has progressively expanded his language to other media such as ceramics, video, design or installation, from where he continues to explore -with greater complexity and variety of references- his characteristic journey through the vast territory of art and culture.

His creative dynamic is also articulated around broad cycles or blocks of work, organized on the basis of specific interests and references. The most recent is entitled Happiness in private lifewhose first installment is now presented as a specific project for ARCO Lisbon.

Happiness in private life brings together and delves into several lines of work and elements that have been present, in a transversal way, throughout his career: architecture, design (industrial and artisanal), decoration as an exploration of concepts such as beauty and style, cultural objects for everyday use and, in a special way, furniture. The latter is approached from a perspective that crosses the essential with the accessory, the functional with the excessive.

The title of the project, which refers directly to the realm of the intimate, also alludes to the concept of domestic space: that complex territory of living atmospheres that, through design, decoration, furniture or the relationship between interior and exterior, defines and materializes -in some way- the life project proposed by architecture. In 1972, the MoMA in New York presented the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscapeand to a large extent, Miki Leal's proposal is allegorically and conceptually connected to that notion of "domestic landscape", as proposed in that exhibition: a framework from which to rethink domesticity, design, good taste, pleasure, functionality, life models, modern ideals, and even the dream -and utopia- of architecture. Also, of course, the nature, function and symbolism of objects in everyday space.

In full harmony with his trajectory, the "domestic landscape" is for Miki Leal a fertile ground from which to revisit themes that have been running through his work for years. Among them, the concept of beauty -with all its possible derivations- occupies a central place, worked here from the symbolic and allegorical, the extravagant and the ironic, and above all, from the circumstantial, recovering the sense that Baudelaire gave to this term.

From this perspective of allegorical irony, Miki Leal conceives the works in this project as a dense web of quotations, icons, genres, symbols and residues. His papers are structured as a mosaic in which references found, sought or invented are mixed, generating connections and "landscapes" that alter meanings and conventions, and propose new atmospheres and narratives. Domestic interiors intertwine with exuberant natural exteriors; architectures that oscillate between the rational and the oneiric; objects and designs that speak to us from dreams, perception or memory, placing themselves between everyday materiality and atmospheric evocation. Markers or signs play with asynchrony; anonymous subjects and presences are reflected and duplicated in recognizable historical figures or moments. Old forms - exhausted, displaced or undervalued - confront or embrace the exuberance of invention and metamorphosis. Operations of hybridization, juxtaposition, displacement or estrangement make multiple and disparate referents coexist, generating new meanings, readings and connections.

If hybridization and the displacement of meanings predominate in his papers, in his objects, ceramics and furniture pieces the focus is on transformation and metamorphosis. In them, values, forms and conventions are stressed to the point of explosion. Design and anti-design dialogue, the decorative and the functional balance each other in an unstable way, convention merges with estrangement. The transformation to which he submits these objects -anonymous, popular, handmade or signed- operates through multiple processes: it may involve an aesthetic alteration, an exploration of their cultural construction, an investigation of their visual qualities or the recovery of the trace that links them to a certain reality or memory. In short, it is a matter of dismantling and reconfiguring that which constitutes them as objects and determines their relationship with us, whether in use, perception or symbol.

At the base of all this, as a substantial element in the work of Miki Leal, is always the vindication of the game and the circumstantial as engines of the creative act. Two characteristics that, far from being banal, challenge us and invite us to rethink and transform our own realities.

-Alberto Martín