4me4you recently stepped inside the ever-inspiring RHODES Contemporary Art gallery to explore CTRL+Paint, the latest solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Spanish artist Lino Lago.
Adding to this complex interplay, Lago introduces gold leaf into many of his compositions. Once a symbol of sacred art in religious iconography, gold here also nods to the extravagance and spectacle of modern culture. In Lago’s hands, it becomes both reverent and rebellious, elevating and obscuring in equal measure, while drawing attention to the physical act of painting.
His use of saturated colour fields, bright, flat, and graphically precise stands in deliberate contrast to the classical figures they partially conceal. These bold visual intrusions feel at once elegant and aggressive, suggesting the fractured nature of our contemporary relationship with images. What does it truly mean to see art when so much of our visual experience is filtered, edited, and consumed digitally?
With CTRL+Paint, Lino Lago offers more than a critique, he proposes a new visual language. One that embraces contradiction, celebrates tradition, and confronts the realities of a pixel-dominated world. The exhibition is a compelling reflection on how classical beauty persists—and mutates—within the framework of contemporary visual culture.
