María Lara (Loja, Granada, 1940) has developed since the early seventies a work focused on sensorial and emotional impressions of all kinds, which in her work are translated into simple and powerful elements - very often bands and lines - that, on the one hand, synthesize those perceptive effects, and, on the other, turn them into pure plasticity (...).

Her brief compositions emphasize the self-referential pictorial quality advocated by Greenberg and exemplified by the concepts of color field painting or all-over painting, without making concessions to either illusion or anecdote. With an economy of means, given that she uses almost exclusively lines and bands of various colors, the artist from Granada manages to capture on canvas and paper a synthetic and refined language. But, in spite of this conscious restriction in the means and graphics that she rigorously uses in her work -her work method may seem at first sight severe and even rigidly programmed-, the result is highly emotional and evocative.

In this way, María Lara's paintings and drawings present a high chromatic value and subtlety; in her works, color vibrates intensely in the succession of vertical or horizontal lines that make them up. Apparently silent, her pieces claim an interiority and intimacy far removed from the spectacular or the anecdotal, and concentrate on an abstract and refined intensity that, far from detracting from emotion, transmits impressions as vivid as they are insightful and everyday sensations related to ineffable matters such as light, air, spatial reverberation, everyday life or spirituality, among others. Eliminating all kinds of illusionism, there remains a powerful and apparently flat pictorial reality that affects the perceptive level by emitting visual and also tactile vibrations that alter the flatness until reaching a perceptive opening that makes the materiality of painting and drawing to be such, but also transfigured substance.

(Fragment of Luz prolongada. La trayectoria artística de María Lara, Manuel Olveira)