Aurora Vigil-Escalera Art Gallery is pleased to present, from August 25 to October 31, "Dogs, conspiracy and heat", the second exhibition of Francisco Mayor Maestre (Madrid, 1990) in our gallery in Gijón.

“Portraying the everyday is, almost certainly, one of the biggest challenges for an artist because everything happens in the everyday, life happens, lives happen, past, present and ones to come. In everyday life we find the biggest fictions, the biggest lies and of course, the biggest truths. We are all in the everyday. With incredible ease, Mayor Maestre leans out of that open window which only a few know how to give the necessary importance, perhaps because he already peeked through it as a child as he made the journey from the suburbs to the center of Madrid by bus. Before him, a changing world every few meters, full of contrasts that began to inhabit or be drawn in his head. That initiatory astonishment is the seed of everything that would come later because the entire universe is found in the routine of a bus trip. (…)

I didn't know the child from the periphery, I didn't even know the first Mayor Maestre. My meeting with him was circumstantial, at some fair, and probably my face in front of one of his works must have resembled his on that bus. I looked and looked at his paintings, discovering at each step a new detail, a surprise, a concern. Who painted that world so real but at the same time so abstract, so familiar and yet so disquieting. Who was the guy who let the seams of his paintings be seen without fear of showing himself as he is.

If you visit one of his exhibitions or -though it’s not the same- look through this catalogue, you will see that his artworks are endless, they have a tendency to infinity, to infinite gaze, to the possibility of returning to them and observing something new that had gone unnoticed in a first approximation. That art is, at least for me, tremendously addictive because it continually challenges us and puts us to the test. "That was not there before" I have come to comment when raising my eyes to works already seen. It is, once again, the everyday, one of the greatest trompe l'oeils in history.

I have been lucky enough to be able to visit his workshop and it is there, if I am wrong, please let him correct these words, where he is happiest, and where he, paradoxically, has the worst time. When he duels with the support, turned into virgin, unexplored territory in which anything can happen and everything is yet to be done. In the choice of color, size, motif, in waiting for the flash of that childhood and his trips that sooner or later will take command of his brushes. In the fury of the paint and in his own fury, making his way through the matter, leaving a trace of the process, like breadcrumbs, which he invites us to continue if we feel like it. His first brushstroke will likely be visible when the battle is over and he has won the duel. Winning does not always happen because I have seen him doubt and not be satisfied with what, to ordinary mortals, would be resounding victories, I have heard him say that he was going to discard something magnificent to my eyes. (…). If you can see these works it is because they border on excellence, otherwise they would rest in the workshop waiting for their opportunity, hoping to find their way. I don't want to imagine, I don't even want to ask him, what it took to complete that 190 x 300 cm work, "The Revolution will have a paywall" (how good are his titles by the way) the largest he has ever done. How many hours and hours taking a step back, always necessary to admire anything, I sense him frowning from time to time, going round and round until he found the key, the right point. Until once again he was leaning out of the bus window, the window of the everyday.” -Fragment from the catalog by Carlos del Amor.