Presentation

Evelio Acebedo
Chairman and CEO, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

Currently I know Adela for about thirty years and I can state confidently that she will continue to amaze us, just as always, through her artistic talent and passion for life.

We are here to be witnesses of her creativity and expressiveness, her unique global vision, as well as her motivations and feelings as an artist; however in order to better understand her work, I also would like to talk about her as an individual.

Color has always been a key factor in the life of Adela: it all began when she was a child, during a long injury recovery her uncle Javier gave her a set of color paints as a present. That along with her talent, sensitivity, imagination and support from her parents contributed to create the person and the artist she is today.

Thanks to these pencils she learned to associate colors to concepts and emotions from her surrounding world, and with time Adela developed her special code of communication. Her canvasses, cardboards, woods from the sea, photographs, even her written works are expressed through colors.

Adela is able to both suggest ideas and thrill the spectator; awakening sometimes his deepest emotions, so in this fashion she completes the communication circle between artist and observer.

Furthermore, Adela is an all-round artist, and like other artists, she has an exhibitionist nature engraved into her personality, making it almost impossible for her not to openly express herself to the public. However this process is, at the same time, the hardest and the most delicate for an artist: to show her inner self, her soul, her essence to the always rigorous audience.

Additionally, and also as an artist, another remarkable feature of Adela is her ability to seduce us with every piece of her work, she is always looking forward to it, and she also knows how to make it happen every time. In the works of Adela we can appreciate her mood: sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes confident, sometimes not confident… but always honest, always passionate, always generous, and above all you can sense her love for art and her efforts to give her 100% in every piece she creates.

But Adela has never wanted to settle down towards her lifetime achievements. Being a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife, a lover, a friend, a teacher…was never enough. That is why one day, in words of the writer Antonio Altarriba (read here), “the artist inside of her hatched, not because she was done with her learning process, but because she has so much left to tell, alas everything that once was concealed behind the darkness and the shadows remained no longer a mystery”.

Taking this into account, you can see that Adela’s beginnings in the art business was natural and spontaneous and a result of accumulated experiences, which came to light as a way of personal and spiritual healing.

She is a self-taught painter, who learned from everything around her: artists, authors, movements, etc. All of this led her to develop her technique with a remarkable self-discipline and devotion.

For instance, her attraction for Gerhard Richter, possibly the best German painter after the Second World War, seemed inevitable: his magical and energetic stroke, agile and colorful over canvas inspired Adela to start her artistic adventure.

But Adela’s sensuality needed more elements to be fully expressed, therefore she started to create colorful cardboards, collages, photography, etc.…all of them with a very passionate and fun feminine seduction game.

In my opinion, Adela also shows another side in some of her creations: Adela as a mother. She does this through artistic woods torn and shaped by the sea, the sea is an essential element to her: she picks up natural woods brought by the sea, then she can heals and takes care of them, giving them love and a new life.

Moreover in her photographs we can see an “Impressionist Adela” that makes me look back to the painter Mary Cassatt, an impressionist American woman who lived during the XIX and XX centuries, and like Adela, was always ahead of her time: a feminist, a fighter for equality, but also proudly claimed the values that women provide to their families and society as a whole.

Adela likes to play with lights and visual effects so that she can make delicate suggestions to her spectators, and lead our minds to stimulate our imagination through her images.

Like Cassat, I am positive that Adela also can finds in her series of “ducks in a pond” a calm peace, love for her near ones and extraordinary value in the everyday life evens.

As I said at the beginning of my speech and also to summarize up, I strongly believe that Adela will continue to surprise everybody, because like the extraordinary artist she is, she will never feel satisfied with her need to express herself. She will always have something to share with the world, something new to investigate or experiment, and she will always look forward to create new ways to seduce.

Evelio Acevedo

Chairman and CEO, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.