So she went out in search of a certain simple hedonism, really simple, a small wood, a quiet place of her own to have a picnic – just as Virginia Woolf did on a riverbank on a morning in early October 1928, pondering over a place of her own – and she felt peaceful and very calm, as she gazed at a house through the trees, as she watched the river flow through the trees, she imagined from this side what she would see from the opposite riverbank, and chased the distorted reflections on the water or the shadows of the birds on the grass – but without even looking at the birds – and she concentrated now, at last, lying in the centre of the blanket which was the very centre of the universe, on the huge trunks of trees, on the mass of the clouds passing by and on the fruit she was carrying as a snack, indistinctly.

She often went out into the countryside like someone who was looking for a better refuge. She went to find the detail in nature without being a character herself: she would never let herself be seen, only to be seen as a faint shadow, without movement, only attentive to those other figures sketched in the memory, in the sequence of instants condensed perhaps in a small glimpse, allegorical, in forms that are effortless, but which we miss the understanding as we approach the light of classicism that always runs through everything like the splendour in the fountain of youth. Glimpses that make us think of so many mornings and afternoons in the park, of Titian’s The Country Concert or Manet’s Déjuneur sur l’herbe but without the characters or looks that defy scandal, of that infinite photo in Antonioni’s film Blow-Up, but without any surprises in the background.

By delimiting the open field of the world, Gema Quiles’ paintings  ransport us to a particular garden that she has in mind, filled with small signs of life, of possible traces – a pair of tennis rackets, a fence, a few pieces of fruit – shown in simple and quiet scenes without almost any action, just some nature. It is a very intuitive exercise in painting that we should look at with the open eyes of Denis Diderot while listening to the sweet digression of his art critic “strolling” in the manner of a descriptive dialogue of the bucolic scenes seen in the 18th century Salons de peinture et sculpture where Diderot took pleasure in the delicate use of light in a particular fragment of Fragonard’s The Swing: all with Rococo sentimentalism.

But, of course, we know that Gema Quiles’ paintings are of the present time and that they require a better look in other ways. They fit in with those qualities that are strong in figurative work like something that cannot be ignored, and they handle the iconicity of the image as a globalised and post-internet phenomenon like a fish in water. However, in addition, Quiles’ poetics and her plastic joie de vivre are somewhat distant from this vision, as if they were happily bordering on the margins of tradition, somewhere between a certain naïf sensuality in drawing and chromaticism, and the influence of painting from the seventies and eighties (I have in my mind the revival of bad paintings, cartoon-strip style or candid illustrations), all condensed in images like sweet pictograms, very synthetic but with an open end meaning, in which sensorial perception is combined with that invisible something that results from memory and experience – and brings us closer to the green gardens of Proust by way of Swann. And one more clue to complete this approach: Quiles’ paintings resonate with that possibility intuited by Barry Schwabsky – confirmed two decades later – that artists at the beginning of the 21st century were no longer linked so much to the historical tradition of painting, its classical canon, just as mythical, but to a new popular technological approach that arose on the screen, from video games to the Internet; and I must add: using the image as a physical object that is constructed and distorted.

Quiles paints very closely to the canvas, completing its flatness with small gestures, with minimal brushstrokes that repeat themselves like leaves on the top of a tree. She goes on a picnic with Virginia Woolf and paints happy enlarged fragments of landscape and still life that point to the center of mystery in the cultural reiteration of the genre and, as Guy Davenport said, inadvertently point to the tragedy that underlies all beauty.