”’Now when you look past Murano you see Venice. That’s my town. There’s plenty more I could show you, but I think we probably ought to roll now. But take one good look at it. This is where you can see how it all happened. But nobody ever looks at it from here.’

‘It’s a beautiful view. Thank you, sir.’

‘O.K.,’ the Colonel said. ‘Let’s roll.’”

- Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and Into the Trees

Irene Grau asserts that a landscape can only be constructed in the observer’s gaze, and perhaps it is the surprised gaze of the foreigner that has the power to determine what, truly, defines a landscape. Almost all of Grau’s work departs from this notion, as the pictorial action of each project is located at the intersection of walking and the exploration of her surrounding landscapes.

For her body of work titled Arquivo Catasós (2017), she methodically photographed each tree along the route of a high-voltage line that threatens to destroy the Catasós forest in Galicia. She then turned the images into sellable postcards, with proceeds helping to finance a campaign against the energy company behind the power lines. In another project, Metría (2017), Grau used wooden measuring sticks to calculate how human foot traffic affects width variations along a mountain path. The metric length of different path widths were matched to the tintometric system (a color tinting system for industrial woodworking), which subsequently determined the color she painted each measuring stick. And, in Constellation (2016), Grau used hikers’ maps showing the trail that crosses the Pyrenees up to the Cantabrian Sea, which, when abstracted, look like star constellations - the effect of which proposes an imaginary relationship between the lines of a footpath on the ground below and the lines forming star constellations in the sky above. These are just some of the strategies the Valencian artist has used to solve the problem of making and discovering painting on the road.

Irene Grau’s work shows her keen interest in exploring various mediums, as well as the history of landscape painting as a pictorial genre. Her artistic practice, which entails entering into different landscapes to find moments when the power of color alters how we see and engage with the world, also strongly aligns with the tradition of monochrome painting, and the ways in which artists have eviscerated the genre’s boundaries by expanding it into social spaces.¹ She says that “monochrome painting, in particular, is dependent on its context; but its context, in turn, has innumerable ramifications on conceptual, spatial, procedural, or performative approaches.” ² Like Daniel Buren or Niele Toroni, she also believes that every surface is susceptible to being converted into a pictorial surface. And, like John Cage, Grau tends to dissolve the separation between art and life by accepting social space as a field of experimentation and artistic action. As seen in the exhibition construction season, she even includes the public as an indispensable part of the work’s creation.

As Gloria Picazo points out, the conventional idea of how to represent landscape evolved into a much expanded understanding in the mid-sixties, during which “landscape turned into matter, context and concept.” ³ Grau’s practice can be situated along this trajectory.

Her work is both formally complex and highly engaged with process, a process based on observations of her surroundings as she walks along the road or across the landscape. It is on the road where much of her work is created: her pieces invite viewers to consider how the artist’s gaze naturally imposes a new frame on a landscape and how the experience of being in transit alters perspective. Her exhibitions usually include photographs, maps, and abstractions that reflect her desire to organize and process the data she’s obtained during her walks.

During her walks, she often takes note of pictorial elements - all the markings guiding her way, such as the trail maps, painted symbols, and road signs - and converts these into images, as well.⁴ At other times, she paints new trail markings herself, tracing new routes or pointing out historically important paths.⁵ She will even transport painted panels or stretchers into a particular landscape, and carefully position them within the natural backdrop to see how they chromatically relate (Color Field, 2014-2015). In the end, Grau’s process - the route she took across the landscape addressed in a specific body of work - is restructured within the context of the exhibition in a way that allows the viewer to reconstruct the artist’s journey, and thereby regard color and landscape through the artist’s eyes: as an incessant search for color as matter that inhabits space.

In each series Grau creates, there are constant references to past artistic practices, such as Hamish Fulton’s mountain silhouettes; the mapping and cartographic depictions of terrain in works by On Kawara and Walter de María; Richard Serra’s sculptural monochromes in the landscape; and Lothar Baumgarten’s pigment pyramids. In various ways, Grau conceptually links each of these art historical references to the history of painting, and thereby positions her own work as part of a practice that similarly expands the horizons of painting, landscape painting, and the monochrome. By classifying her works as “paintings,” she demonstrates that contemporary painting can be mobile, conscious, political, and postmodern; her expanded definition also asks us to reconsider what it means for a contemporary painting to be site-specific.

With her exhibition at MMoCA, construction season (2017-18), Grau transformed the meaning of site-specificity. Upon arriving in Madison and embarking on long walks throughout the city, her painterly gaze and interest in color quickly led her to notice the intricate network of graffiti painted across the city’s sidewalks and roads. She found the ground riddled with abstract signs and markings - lines, arrows, and crosses, all in determined and prescribed colors. Grau used these spray-painted notations as trail markers, following their winding routes across Madison, and simultaneously photographing and hand-tracing them to record her route. She also collected sticks and rocks along the way that were accidentally painted because of their proximity to the colorfully marked spots on the sidewalks and streets. These elements come together as a form of documentation, as Grau’s method for recording what, in her eyes, are instances of site-specific paintings existing within Madison’s landscape.

Henry David Thoreau once famously wrote, “We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.” ⁶ Thoreau’s notion of exploring space on both a literal and symbolic level appealed to Grau during her self-imposed city rambles. Rather than predetermined, her route became random, it turned into a drawing, a line across the very surface of the city, with a movement akin to Ricardo Basbaum’s action diagrams.

Regardless of the uncertainty of her route, Grau quickly recognized that the painted markings, despite the apparent chaos of their appearance, were part of a larger organizational system. The complex series of lines and symbols are part of a real warning system, which was created after a block of flats exploded in California in 1976 when a gas pipe was accidentally cut during construction. After that unfortunate incident, the American Public Works Association (APWA) established a regulated set of annotations and associated colors to safely designate where wires, pipes, and other structures are buried underground. Public works departments across the country use the same color guidelines, which are governed by the Munsell color system, a standardized color code that also corresponds to the Pantone color system.

Further, Grau’s work quickly acquires a social and political dimension. Viewing the lines, arrows, and circles painted in vibrant safety color code colors, reminded her of graffiti - a pictorial medium historically mobilized by anarchists and counterculture artists to protest capitalistic systems. However, this medium of “disruption” is now implanted within our municipal system as the means by which a reality of our cities, an enunciation of our ways of life and buried under our feet, is brought to the surface.

With construction season, Grau has created a collaborative work in which the ideas of playing a game, systematically marking space, and exploring the landscape of a certain place all play key roles. The idea of site specificity, as previously mentioned, is equally important. Transforming her hand-tracings of the street markings into painted metal shapes, Grau creates an abstract puzzle for visitor to the exhibition to engage with - perfectly mobile, perfectly rearrangeable. And, by asking people to arrange the shapes in the gallery according to notations they recall from their daily walks outside, she abstracts a standardized system of communication from its function to turn it into a game - a playful proposal that helps to make citizens more conscious of the colors and images that are ubiquitous in their own city. The visitor also becomes a contributor to the work, with the artist’s invitation to look for accidentally painted elements in order to take them into the museum space and add them to the exhibition. Construction season does not end in the work of Irene Grau, but rather it fully engages the community and becomes an exhibition that will remain eternally unfinished until its closure.

- Mónica Maneiro, Art Critic and Curator

¹ Irene Grau authored a doctoral thesis titled “The Painter on the Road: From Landscape painting to painting in the Landscape,” in which she analyzes the relationship between walking and the development of monochrome painting.

² Irene Grau, “The Painter on the Road: From Landscape painting to painting in the Landscape,” p. 80.

³ Picazo, Gloria. “The home, city, territory and landscape” in Spanish Contemporary Art 1992-2013. La Fábrica, Madrid, 2013.

⁴ Such as in Grau’s exhibition “Lo que importaba estaba en la línea, no en el extremo,” Madrid, 2015.

⁵ In 2016, she made 150 black paint marks indicating the route between Banyuls-sur-Mer (France) and Portbou (Spain) via the Coll de Rumpisó, a route used by many to escape the Nazi regime, including the German philosopher Walter Benjamin.

⁶ “Can the Museum be a Garden?,” various authors, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal, 2015.