Two ways of seeing realism

Antonio Garcia Soler paints water so precisely that the paint disappears. In Nazaret I (2023, mixed media on canvas, 120 x 100 cm), a wave curls into a wall of green glass, a surfer caught mid-drop inside a curtain of white spray built with an exactness that borders on photographic. Its companion, Nazaret II (2023, mixed media on canvas, 120 x 100 cm), records the same Portuguese break from a second vantage point, the two panels conceived together as a single study of one of Europe's most famous surf spots.

That commitment to optical exactness sits inside a catalog built mostly on color and gesture. A few entries away, Angela Carli practices a different kind of realism, one that names its own materials instead of hiding them: newspaper clippings, magazine pages, and advertising ephemera from the 1950s and 1960s, glued down and painted over until a face or a car emerges from the collected debris of another decade. Between these two artists, the word realism ends up describing almost opposite instincts.

Jaloe Art Gallery's program leans heavily on abstraction and gestural color. Garcia Soler and Carli sit outside that current entirely, each pursuing a documentary instinct that abstraction sets aside, and setting their two catalogs side by side says something about how wide the word figurative can stretch inside a single gallery.

Water without a single visible stroke

Garcia Soler's catalog at Jaloe runs eight paintings deep, each cataloged under the same Realism style tag, each built on the same discipline: remove anything that calls attention to the hand. Feeling Life (2024, mixed media on canvas, 100 x 100 cm) applies that discipline to a still, sunlit stretch of coast. Diamond Peak I (2023, mixed media on canvas, 100 x 100 cm) turns the same eye toward a mountain lake, the water rendered with the same glassy patience as the seascapes that make up most of the catalog.

Wave After Wave (2025, oil on canvas, 120 x 80 cm), worked in oil where the earlier paintings use mixed media, drenches a turquoise and green swell in the soft, even light of early morning. Sometimes the water carries a human figure, its scale and posture giving the wave something to measure itself against, as in the two Nazaret paintings. Other times, as in Sea of Life (2025, mixed media on canvas, 100 x 100 cm) and Sea Breeze I (mixed media on canvas, 100 x 100 cm), the water fills the frame alone, current and light doing the work without a swimmer or a surfer to explain why the moment matters.

That range, from populated wave to empty swell, is what keeps eight paintings of water from reading as one repeated exercise. What holds the catalog together is the refusal to let a single stroke show: shadow, foam, and the play of light across a moving surface are worked until they read as recorded fact, the paint erased from its own surface.

Portraits built from other people's headlines

Angela Carli's realism begins with someone else's newspaper. In Charlie Chaplin, un giorno senza un sorriso è un giorno perso (2023, mixed media on canvas, 150 x 100 cm), a warm, lifelike portrait of the actor sits over a ground built from vintage press clippings, with the Italian phrase that gives the piece its title, meaning a day without a smile is a day wasted, worked directly into the composition. Amy Winehouse, cuore sacro (2023, mixed media on canvas, 200 x 100 cm) applies the same method to a different kind of icon, its retro newsprint ground standing in for a period frame around a face that never lived to see this decade.

The newspaper is never disguised. In Marilyn, Vintage Cinzano (mixed media on canvas, 120 x 120 cm), a monochrome portrait of Marilyn Monroe sits against fragments of 1950s Italian advertisements in ochre, crimson, and faded blue, and the contrast between the muted face and the loud collage carries the real charge of the piece: the tension between a woman and the icon assembled from her image. Carli extends the same collage logic past portraiture and into pure object worship in Porsche 911 (2025, acrylic and 1950s newspaper on canvas, 160 x 100 cm) and its companion Ferrari 250 GTO (2025, mixed media on canvas, 160 x 100 cm), where a classic car takes the place usually held by a face, set against the same vintage press ground.

Carli's catalog at Jaloe now runs close to twenty paintings, spanning film stars, a musician, a golfer, and two sports cars, and the range keeps widening: Maddalena (mixed media on canvas, 100 x 100 cm), one of the most recent additions, lets a woman's face emerge from a ground of 1950s newsprint with looser, more gestural handling than the earlier portraits, suggesting the vintage-collage method still has new registers left to try.

Two definitions of one word

Both artists are cataloged inside styles that promise some version of the real, yet each builds that promise on a different foundation. Garcia Soler's realism works by concealment: the paint erases every trace of its own making, so water, light, and a surfer's balance read like observed fact. Carli's realism works by exposure: the newspaper stays legible beneath the paint, the collage seams stay visible, and the finished portrait announces its own construction on the surface.

That difference reaches past technique into subject matter. Garcia Soler's subject is a place: the coastline at Nazaret and the seascapes that follow it, held still long enough to be studied. Carli's subject is memory: the way a face like Chaplin's or Monroe's survives mainly as a media image, repeated until the person and the picture become the same thing. Realism, inside Jaloe's catalog, ends up describing two very different kinds of attention, one paid to the world in front of the artist, the other paid to the images the world has already made of itself.

Both catalogs remain part of Jaloe Art Gallery's ongoing collection, on view alongside the gallery's broader program of abstraction on the Costa Blanca.