Taking in her paintings is like opening your eyes after a nap in the sand. The colourful masses on her canvas appear to be in motion, plunging the spectator into a semi-conscious state. Beyond the merely pictorial, Ana Montiel's works read like spiritual, dreamlike invitations, that hit you with a feeling of satisfaction and involuntary entrancement. Any tangible form looks acid-washed; a silhouette or a ray of sun gives way to a sfumato of light and pigments. The artist is interested in the conceptual issues of perception and phenomenology, based on the premise that reality is nothing but a collective and controlled hallucination. Intrigued by neuroscience and quantum physics, she considers herself a "mapper of the unconscious", producing the Fields series -a multicoloured adventure meant as a tribute to the intangible. 

In the course of practicing hybrid art, drifting from drawing to design to artistic direction, Ana Montiel shunned painting during her school years before finally embracing it. Originally from Spain (b. 1981), the artist worked in Barcelona and then in London, before settling down in Mexico. Her colour palette stimulates both visually and acoustically, like a kind of chorus, giving each spectator their own unique symphony. 

Ana Montiel's art vibrates, resonates, and performs a kind of synaesthesia, marrying noise and matter, pixel and sound. Indeed, before setting to work, the artist communes with her canvas thanks to a moment of musical and physical awakening. She gathers the colours and applies them carefully with her spray gun. The tints fuse, superimpose, then come to rest. Detail by detail, each grain of colour is adjusted according to a meticulous method of application of acrylics, with some paintings having up to forty sub-layers. The effect is magnetic, in much the same vein as the mystical installations of American artist James Turrell or the meditative velvets of the Italian Ettore Spaletti. With her pictorial works, Ana Montiel opens windows onto a world that topples us and shoves us towards new prophetic dimensions, dimensions of the infinite and unknown.

Clélia Dehon - Head of Public Program at Louis Vuitton Foundation.

Text extracted from The Steidz magazine, issue no. 5

With my entoptic paintings -entos (within) and opsis (to see) - I reflect on the inner, undefined nature of human experience. These paintings function as a personal analogy for the illusion of a truly unbiased perception, meditating around the phenomenology of our embodied consciousness that co-creates all that we perceive.

It is "the self in the gaze", it is us trying to see through a window only to find our distorted reflection in the glass.

Ana Montiel