Friday, February 13, at 5:30 PM, the spaces of Lineadarte Officina Creativa (Via S. Paolo, 31) host the opening of the solo exhibition by Spanish artist Mateos Alicante (José Francisco Manuel Mateos Gras). The event, directed by Giovanna Donnarumma and Gennaro Ippolito, features critical contribution from Mino Iorio, who will discuss the distinctive traits of a painting dense with historical and psychological implications.
The exhibition is an introspective journey rooted in the artist’s childhood, spent inside a Civil Guard barracks during the final stages of the Spanish Civil War. For Alicante, art is "the highest expression of freedom available to humanity" and a tool to activate the senses through memory. His works reflect an environment he perceived as hostile, marked by social crises and religious influences, where the warmth of family represented the only safe refuge.
Critic Mino Iorio frames Alicante’s work as a lucid inquiry into the capacity of images to condense psychological tensions and collective memories. According to Iorio, Alicante does not merely represent the world, he traverses it and filters it through a thick, chunky brushstroke that becomes "gesture, resistance, and an accumulation of time." The domestic dimension and authority: in works such as the one depicting the family with a gendarme, the artist explores the boundary between private protection and public control. The use of an image within an image (a photograph on the canvas) creates a short circuit between historical document and pictorial interpretation. The archetypal motherhood: in the painting Nude Pregnant Woman, Alicante confronts Picasso’s lesson, making the body a symbolic territory where fragility and generative force coexist. In convivial scenes enriched by references to Goya’s La Maja Desnuda, the artist creates friction between traditional painting and contemporary language, challenging the linear continuity of art history. A painting that “reveals” Through the use of a palette knife and strong colors applied without mediation, Alicante transforms the ordinary into an enigma. As Iorio emphasizes, Alicante’s painting shows how art can still today be a critical instrument capable of questioning the present without renouncing historical depth.
Summary sheet
Alicante Mateos - Mi vida
solo show
Naples – February 13–27, 2026
Lineadarte Officina Creativa
Via S. Paolo ai tribunali, 31 Naples
hours:
Monday from 11:00 to 15:00
Tuesday and Friday by appointment
Thursday from 10:00 to 14:00
(possibly varies, always verify by phone)
Vernissage: Friday, February 13, 5:30 PM
curators: Giovanna Donnarumma, Gennaro Ippolito
Introduction: Mino Iorio (Art Critic and Historian)
authors: Alicante Mateos
genre: contemporary art, evening – event, solo show
For information
Phone: 3275849181 - 3342839785
Email: lineadarte@gmail.com