A warm blue is one that leans towards red, and a shaded room on a hot day fills with exactly that colour. Nuria Maria has called her third Milan exhibition after it, and Cadogan Gallery has hung the show across two entirely different wall colours so that the same paintings are read twice.
Blues Rouge, the new solo exhibition by Nuria Maria at Cadogan Gallery in Milan, runs until 17 October 2026 and takes its name from a piece of painter’s colour vocabulary. Blues are sorted into warm and cool depending on which way they lean. Ultramarine leans towards red and is the warm one. Cerulean and the phthalo blues lean towards green and are the cool ones. A blue with red in it is the colour a room fills with when the shutters are half closed against a hot afternoon, and it is also, more or less, the colour of a shadow falling across pale stone in August.
Maria describes the show as a pleasant silent calmth in a cool room amidst the heat of the summer, and says the title describes the warm blues in the cool shades and the light in the windows. That is a specific instruction rather than a mood, and the exhibition has been installed as though it were one.
The hang does the work the title describes
The Milan gallery on Via Bramante is a long ground floor room with tall arched windows down one side, a pale poured floor that throws the daylight back up, and a continuous recessed strip of light running in the ceiling coving. For most of the exhibition the walls are left white and the paintings are hung wide apart, so the light coming through the arches is doing most of the illumination. In one of the strongest moments, a canvas is hung directly in the window reveal, taking the daylight across its surface at a raking angle rather than flat on.
Then the walls change. A further sequence of rooms has been painted a deep olive grey and lit with tight directional spots, and the effect on the same body of work is immediate. The reds that sat quietly inside the pale canvases in the daylit rooms come forward and hold the wall. A large horizontal in dark red reads as almost monochrome in the white gallery and as a field of heat in the dark one. The cool shades and the light in the windows, laid out as two adjacent conditions you walk between.
The framing is consistent throughout and carries more than it appears to. Every work sits in a slim pale timber float frame with a warm raw edge left visible, which keeps the frames reading as part of the painting on a white wall and as a thin line of light on a dark one. On a show that depends on the same pictures behaving differently in two rooms, that is not a small thing.
What Nuria Maria is actually painting
The exhibition gathers twelve paintings, almost all oil on linen, with one worked on jute. The range of scale is wide and deliberate. Blue Sky over Water runs to 205 by 250 centimetres and October Red is a 122 by 244 centimetre horizontal, while Evening Red and Wittem Hills in White are both 50 by 60. Between them sit October Silver at 127 by 265, White Linen Under a Cherry Tree, Spring Petals at Dawn, Rose Petal, Landscape in September, Red Stone, Petral, Firesmoke on jute, and a diptych titled Landscape in Dark Red, Charcoal, whose central join is visible as a vertical seam straight through the middle of the image.
