Living and working in Madrid, Chus García-Fraile has already become an internationally renowned artist. Coming primarily from painting, where she has developed an impeccable style, she works in a multidisciplinary way, comfortably fluctuating between photography, drawing, sculpture, video and installation. She uses art as a language and does not specially make difference between one and another technique or material, only appealing to the communicative potential of the different conditions in each work, investigating its resources to reach the best materialization of her message. Through art she recodifies those details that in her opinion constitute and represent our reality, the so called welfare state.

Chus García-Fraile is constantly wondering about the daily conditions of our society. Art is the best way she can share with the audience her thoughts and preoccupations about the present. She asks herself about our role regarding to nowadays conditions, without offering neither explicit criticism nor hermetic opinions, but hoping that through the feed-back with the audience it would be possible to build reasons for an analysis of what she suggests. Highlighting some empirical truth makes the audience consider, like her and with her, those items she feels are important in our global culture. Her work talks about subjects as the excessive construction and the consequent housing speculation, the worship to the objects, the thin frontier between private and public, the continuous necessity of explanations, not only for the facts but also for our environment, destroying its natural essence to turn it into a fun fair, into a visitable place.

In the series “For Sale” Chus García-Fraile proposes images of buildings, being something between painting and digital image, between real and virtual. The reality in these images is represented by their own title, the price of each building in the market. The degradation process of the image from pictorial realism to the digital image, reduced to the minimum element that is the pixel, talks about the fragmentation of our society. Through this bipolar technique García-Fraile opposes the real necessity of having a home and the obsessive and insatiable desire of possession, more appropriate in a fiction world. Although the remains of illusion in our culture are very few, the reality becomes unreal, governed by exaggerated values, deformed and aesthetically turned into icons of the postmodernity.

The same contrast is manifested in “Metropolis” that even though it seems an old black and white photograph, it is a charcoal drawing. Here, the relation between realism and fiction appears again, playing the artist a rule of magician, able to decide on the nature of what surrounds us and deceiving the spectator, making him see as truth what in fact is just a product of our imagination.

With the current exhibition and under the title “Megalopolis” her reasoning merges into what already is a principal item in her work: the big city as a node and as a paradigm of the occidental contemporary society; the city as a meeting point for all different subjectivities and as a subjectivity producer. It is possible to represent and explain the most important items of her work through the concept of “megalopolis”, her interests concerning to the man and society. This is how it is a synthetic but also a concise exhibition, able to offer a proper introduction of the artist and a good epilogue to the most expert audience.

Her work began treating the detail as a component of a totality, analyzing small objects resulting of the activity in the consumer society like trainers or cans, but in this show she is interested in the macro sizes, taking the big city as the most elevated level in the contemporary society, as a container and generator of the social dynamics she is proposing.