Fúcares Gallery presents Miki Leal’s (Seville, 1974) first solo exhibition at our art gallery in Almagro.

"I dropped old Phoebe’s record. It broke into about fifty pieces […]. I damn near cried, it made me feel so terrible, but all I did was, I took the pieces out of the envelope and put them in my coat pocket. They weren’t good for anything, but I didn’t feel like just throwing them away."
D.J. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Mikitology is not a title chosen at random – it is not even the artist’s private joke for himself and for jazz, when, half in earnest half teasingly, he first decided to put this name to an exhibition. Mikitology is the territory in which Miki Leal paints or lives; in which he views other paintings, chooses scenes from movies, selects record covers or discovers books. Mikitology is a personal, cryptic world in which the artist, with an absolute innocence, does not let anybody in, coming out once in a while to those of us who approach him with interest and curiosity, opening his doors for us like the perfect host as he unfolds on the floor, or hangs on the wall, the papers on which traces of the lives fabricated by Miki Leal in Mikitology have settled.

No path leads us in there. We can look at his work and think that we understand all that he tells us. Sometimes we may decipher some hidden meaning, or project on it our personal knowledge of those records, books or film cuts, but then we’ll never be walking towards Mikitology. Mistakenly, we considered ourselves his guests of honour, because the artist makes us mistakenly feel as such with his nice colours and old records, evocative for us all of apparently common places and times – of their domestic architectures, their dreamlike landscapes, their poetic glazes… But Mikitology is a closed, dark, dense universe crammed with the lucidity of an artist who has matured and already has the humbly proud gaze of real artists, those who know there’s nothing ahead but the path each one traces for themselves, and then nothing. This is the reason why Miki Leal cannot be disentangled from Mikitology anymore; because it is his defence against despair; this mysterious and prophetic domain is the place where man dies and the artist lives.

María José Solano Franco.
Madrid, 2009