Long celebrated for her large-scale portraits and her reinvented fresco technique, Cabellut renders the "skin" of her subjects as though it had been weathered by time — a mesh of fissures, flaking, scratches and fault lines. Whether the women in her paintings meet the viewer's gaze or let their eyes drift, they exude a presence impossible to ignore.一向以大型肖像画和改良湿壁画技法闻名的Cabellut，笔下人物的“肌肤”仿佛被时间侵蚀，龟裂、剥落、擦痕与断层交错；画中女性无论是凝视观众或眼神游离，都散发逼人的存在感。
Critics have placed her alongside the 17th-century Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, crediting her with the same gift for using chiaroscuro and dense, weighty brushwork to lay bare the inner life of her subjects. Yet the comparison may not quite capture her style, for she is heir at once to the drama of Spanish classical painting and to contemporary art's abiding inquiry into identity and the memories that shape us — and within all that saturated emotion she always holds back a note of silence, a lingering hush. That complexity mirrors the journey of her own life.艺评家把她和17世纪荷兰画家伦勃朗(Rembrandt van Rijn)相提并论，认为她同样善于以明暗对比和厚重笔触突出人物的内心状态。然而，这个称谓或许并不足以概括她的画风，因为她既承袭西班牙古典绘画的戏剧性，也延续当代艺术对身份认同与成长记忆的持续追问，而在浓烈饱满的情绪之中，始终保留一份静默的余韵。这种复杂性与她的人生旅程彼此呼应。
A Singular Technique That Echoes a Legendary Life独特技法呼应传奇身世
Cabellut was born in 1961 in Aragon, in north-eastern Spain, into a childhood of hardship, drifting and begging on the streets of Barcelona. After the death of the grandmother who had been her whole world, she was placed in an orphanage; at the age of 12 she was adopted by a wealthy Catalan family, and from there her fate was rewritten.1961年，Cabellut生于西班牙东北部的阿拉贡地区，童年境遇非常坎坷，在巴塞罗那街头流浪和乞讨。当相依为命的外祖母去世后，她被送进孤儿院，12岁时被一户富裕的加泰罗尼亚家庭收养，命运由此改写。
When she first walked into the Prado Museum in Madrid and stood before works by Goya, Velázquez and Rembrandt, she was profoundly moved — and came to sense the bond between painting and her own existence. Moving to the Netherlands at 19, she studied art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where the Dutch classical masters' handling of light, skin and inner life left a deep mark on her, gradually evolving into her signature reinvented fresco technique — a method of ceaseless layering, destruction and rebuilding upon the canvas.当她第一次走进马德里的普拉多美术馆，看到戈雅、委拉斯贵支与伦勃朗等人的作品，深受启发，也由此意识到绘画与自身存在之间的关联。19岁移居荷兰后，她进入阿姆斯特丹的Gerrit Rietveld Academie修读艺术，荷兰古典画中对光线、皮肤与人物内心的处理对她影响深远，并逐渐发展为在画布上以不断叠加、破坏与重建而构成的标志性改良湿壁画技法。
"A person is never a single thing. We are made of memory, of scars, of desire, of contradiction, and of a self forever shedding its skin and growing anew." So she decodes her own work. Her singular method gives the surface the cracked texture of an aged wall, carrying within it the traces of time and memory.“人从来不是单一的存在，我们经历过记忆、伤痕、欲望、矛盾和不断蜕变的成长过程。”她为自己的作品“解画”，她的独特画法使画面呈现出陈旧墙壁般的裂纹质感，承载着时间与记忆的痕迹。
She paints, scrapes, cuts and tears the surface again and again. The parts wiped away, the exposed underlayers and the edges that can no longer be read together form a kind of "absence" — yet that is precisely where the emotion runs deepest. This missing quality, she believes, is a mark of respect for human complexity. "Inside every person there is a place even they cannot enter, and my work is meant to keep that secret intact. The most powerful part of a work of art often comes from what is hidden. Just as in music and poetry, it is the silences and the empty spaces that hold what the artist truly means to say."她不断为绘画上色、刮擦、切割与撕裂，那些被擦掉的部分、裸露的底层，以及无法辨认的边缘，形成了一种“缺席”，但那又是画中情绪最浓烈的部分。她认为，这份缺失是对人类复杂性的尊重。“每个人心里都有一个连自己都无法进入的区域，我的作品就是要把这个秘密保留下来。艺术品最强烈的部分，往往来自隐匿之处。正如音乐与诗歌的沉默与空白，构成了艺术家真正想要表达的内容。”
Restoring Women's Worth赋予女性存在价值
From a homeless waif tossed about by circumstance to an "international blue-chip contemporary artist," the path Cabellut has travelled shows that identity is never fixed but flows on with the passage of time. She paints her own experience into portraits of mottled colour, holding them against a reality that may be dazzling or riddled with wounds, and leaves each viewer to draw out their own meaning. "Painting is like a mirror. Even shattered, it goes on reflecting our humanity."从颠沛流离的流浪儿到成为“国际蓝筹当代艺术家”，Cabellut走过的路说明了人的身份绝非固定不变，而是随着时间推移而流动不息。她把个人体验画成色彩斑驳的肖像，对照光鲜亮丽或千疮百孔的现实，让观众各自读出个中况味。“绘画像一面镜子，即使支离破碎，依然持续映照着人性。”
Her recent solo exhibition Layered Identities at Opera Gallery Singapore presents 17 new works, every subject a woman. "The female figure carries an ancient, deep-seated memory — one of resilience, courage, fragility, silence, dignity and transformation," she says. "For centuries women have been looked at and defined through the eyes of others, and I wanted to restore to them a worth entirely their own."她近期在新加坡Opera Gallery举办个展《Layered Identities》，交出17幅新作，画中人清一色是女性。她说：“女性形象承载着古老而深层的记忆，涵盖韧性、勇气、脆弱、沉默、尊严与转化。几个世纪以来，女性始终透过他人的目光被观看与定义，而我想重新赋予女性独特存在价值。”
She seeks to give her subjects a psychological space that is complex and self-possessed, transforming them from objects to be looked at into people with a consciousness of their own — and inviting the viewer to rethink what it means to inhabit a woman's identity.她试图让画中人呈现复杂而独立的心理空间，使她们从被观看的对象转化为拥有主体意识的人，引导观众重新思考女性的身份经验。
She also breathes new ideas into tradition, marrying the texture of classical fresco with abstract brushwork — as in Marian II, one of this year's new works. "Tradition is not a dead museum. I cannot rest in mere reverence for our cultural inheritance; I have to step outside the given frame and let a contemporary spirit come through."此外，她为传统融入新意，将古典湿壁画的肌理与抽象笔触相互结合，今年推出的新作《Marian II》就是好例子。“传统并不是一座死去的博物馆，我不能停留在对文化遗产的单纯敬意之中，而是要跳出既有框架，让当代精神浮现。”
This is what she calls her practice of "freedom": creating without ego, letting go of any reliance on established technique, pulling herself out of the safety net and into a realm that keeps throwing up new questions. "I love a process that is beyond control and always in the unknown — and life is exactly the same."这是她所谓的“自由练习”方式：创作时放下我执，并舍弃对既有技法的依赖，让自己从安全感中抽离，进入一个不断生出疑问的领域。“我很享受这种不受控制、始终处于未知的创作过程，而生活也是如此。”
A Tug-of-War Between Strength and Fragility力量与脆弱的拔河
Cabellut's portraits carry a "skin"-like texture. Human skin, she notes, is never perfectly smooth, and the cracks, layers and grain she works into a painting are not there for form alone but to register the sediment of time, experience and trauma — building a figure with a story to tell. "Too much perfection is dull. It is the cracks that bring out our humanity."Cabellut的肖像画呈现一种“皮肤”般的质感，她指出，人的肌肤并非绝对光滑，她让绘画呈现裂痕、层次与肌理，并非只为形式，而是表现时间、经历与创伤的沉积，成就一个有故事的人物形象。“过于完美让人感觉乏味，有了裂缝才更能突显人性。”
In her work the figures dwell perpetually in a state where strength and fragility coexist, a tension born of her observation of human experience and quietly echoing her own life. "Every face," she says, "is in a sense an archive of emotion and culture, carrying within it migration, loss, desire and collective memory."在她的作品中，人物始终处于力量与脆弱并存的状态，这种张力来自她对人类经验的观察，也是她自身经历形成隐性呼应。她说：“每一张脸在某种意义上都是情感与文化的档案，承载着迁徙、失落、欲望与集体记忆。”
In recent years her work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul and Dubai, making her one of the most closely watched Spanish women artists on the international contemporary stage. In an age awash with photography and AI-generated imagery, she still insists on painting as an act of physical labour, letting destruction, repair and time settle together into the surface — investing it with a weight that no digitally generated image could ever replace.近年来，她的作品在纽约、巴黎、伦敦、香港、新加坡、首尔与迪拜等地展出，使她成为当代国际艺术语境中最受关注的西班牙女性艺术家之一。在摄影与人工智能图像高度泛滥的时代，她依旧坚持以身体劳动的方式进行绘画，将破坏、修复与时间共同沉积在画面之中，蕴含着一份数码生成的图像所无法替代的重量。
Lita Cabellut Solo Exhibition — Layered IdentitiesLita Cabellut个展《Layered Identities》
Venue: Opera Gallery Singapore (2 Orchard Turn, #02-16, Ion Orchard, Singapore 238801)地点：Opera Gallery Singapore(2 Orchard Turn, # 02-16, Ion Orchard, Singapore 238801)
Dates: Now until 7 June日期：即日起至6月7日
Tags:Tags:
