CATALAN ARTISTS AT EXP0'92

RAFAEL BARTOLOZZI. TOT UN ESTIU, 198 1

25 CATALANARTISTS ARE EXHIBITING THEIR WORK AT THE CATALANPAVILION AT EXPO'92, THE UNIVERSALEXHIBI- TION TAKING PLACE THIS YEAR IN SEVILLE. PRE- SENTS IN THIS SPECIAL DOSSIER AN ARTICLE PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN THE MAGAZINE 6LC~~~~~~w-0F THE DEPART- MENT OF CULTUREOF THE GENERALITATDE CATALUNYA-, WHICH PROVIDES INFORMATION ON THE ARTISTS AND PRE- SENTS A CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON THEIR WORK.

J. CORREDOR-MATHEOS AUTHOR AND CRlTlC

ZUSH. LA TREGUA. 1986

wenty-five exhibitions. A uni- A country's art is as much that belong- pieces-, the high points of Catalan art, versal exhibition is always an ing to the historical heritage, that from the Romanesque, at the time of excellent occasion for projecting which has achieved a certain indisputa- the very formation of Catalonia as a not only industrial and technical pro- ble quality, as that which is being pro- nation, and the Gothic, to the wealth of ducts, but cultural products too. In the duced at the present moment. In select- the twentieth century, always with a res- past, this has always been understood ing what is already historical heritage, trictive criterion limited to the greatest by a great diversity of countries, who the problem raised is one of representa- international figures. have presented their painters, sculptors tiveness and choice. The present, nat- The general curator of the pavilion, and other artists in specially designed urally, is more risky and, by definition, Francesc Sanuy, who has seen the whole buildings. This is also the way Catalo- disputable. project through with great drive and nia has understood it in the case of its The historical selection, in the case of taste, wanted the presence of today's participation in the Expo at Seville the Catalan pavilion, sets out to show, artists -that is, living artists- to form a '92. with a small sample -twelve, fifteen succession. In view of the number of SERGl AGUILAR. IT N.O 3, 1989 PEREJAUME. WATZMANN. 1988

weeks the exhibition lasts, there could tions, twenty-five would seem to be in- me (J.M. Llompart), Tom Carr (Gloria also be twenty-five invited artists. The sufficient and makes it impossible to Moure) and Antoni Clavé (Manuel Vaz- challenge was, and is, a great one: to include others who we also feel deserve quez Montalbán). present twenty-five exhibitions, each of to be present. We also plan to publish a folder of which was to last only seven days. A The names of these twenty-five artists, lithographs in the usual limited edition, challenge for the organisers, an effort for with their presenters, in the order that which will serve as a souvenir and as a the Generalitat de Catalunya, and also has been established, are as follows: An- gift for some of the important figures for the artists. Each exhibition will have toni Tapies (J. Corredor-Matheos), Al- who visit our pavilion, with the particu- its own catalogue, and the presenter bert Rafols-Casamada (Antoni Mari), larity that there will be twenty-four -the critic or writer chosen by the Josep Guinovart (Angel Crespo), Joan lithographs and that Tapies will be re- artist- will also have the job of making an Hernandez-Pijuan (M. Teresa Blanch), sponsible for the conception and the oral presentation on the day of the inau- Xavier Corberó (Luis Goytisolo), Fre- work of the folder that will contain guration. In the selection and other deric Amat (Vicenc Altaió), Joan Pere them. Another object that will be used work in the artistic sphere which corre- Viladecans (Josep Miquel García), Jo- as a gift for other people and institu- sponded to me, 1 have had the collabora- sep M. Subirachs (Francesc Fontbona), tions it is intended to distinguish will be tion of two advisers, Cesáreo Rodrí- Montserrat Gudiol (Francesc Miralles), a medal -not at al1 conventional- pro- guez-Aguilera and Daniel Giralt-Mira- Moises Villklia (M. Lluisa Borras), duced by Antoni Clavé. cle. The selection has, of course, presen- Eduard Arranz Bravo (Luis Casado), This is the programme as laid out by ted great problems, because of the large Sergi Aguilar (Menene Gras), Rafael the president of the Generalitat de Ca- number of Catalan artists and the fact Bartolozzi (Joan Abelló), Carles Pazos talunya, Jordi Pujol, at the presentation that we wanted the exhibition to be re- (Victoria Combalía), Antoni Llena (Ma- of the project for the pavilion and the presentative of the generations that nuel Borja). (Cesáreo activities thzt will take place there. We coincide at these moments and that cov- Rodríguez-Aguilera), J.J. Tharrats (Da- are sure that the work al1 this has in- er fifty years of the life of Catalonia: niel Giralt-Miracle), Xavier Grau volved will be repaid by an exhibit which, from those who made themselves (Anna Guasch), Francesc Artigau (Mi- thanks to the merits of our creators, will known before the civil war, to the que1 Molins), Marcel Martí (Arnau be a brilliant one and one representa- young people who are beginning to Puig), Robert Llimós (Rafael Santos tive of the rich reality our art has had achieve recognition. Under these condi- Torroella), Zush (Mane1 Clot), Perejau- and continues to have. DOSS-IER-

TAPIES. CAMA. 1988 MlXED TECHNIQUE ON PAPER, 64.5 x 50 CM

RAFOLSCASAMADA. ARGONAUTES, 1983. ACRYLICICANVAS. 1 bu x 100 CM HERNANDEZPIJUAN. LA CASA DESDE 1A QUE SE MIRA El CAMPO. 011 ONARCHES PAPER, 157 x 120 CM

MR. EMPTY HEAD, 1988. BASALT, 147 x 59 x 56 CM ROCINANTE. THE HORSE. BASALT. 22 1 x 87 x 7 1 CM the bank of Tapies's art the everyday of Fine Arts. Beginning in the sixties he world is illuminated with a new light. To moved towards still life and introduced move around this terrain we have to isolated objects; these years saw his learn to get to grips with symbols, a gradual discovery of the landscape ANTONI TAPIES profound language that calls for the use theme. The space is measured to the last (, 19231 of al1 our powers and that allows us to millimetre and the painting based on a understand otherwise unexplainable study of colour, light and movement; One of the founders, in 1948, of Dau al phenomena. Crosses, letters, numbers, subsequently he introduced large mo- Set, he held his first individual exhibition different signs, open wounds in the mat- nochrome fields using vibratile, atmo- at the Galeries Laietanes in 1950. Since ter, the matter itself in its transparency, spheric brushstrokes; later he returned then his work has been exhibited in many the elements it incorporates, a treat- to insinuated figurative references. galleries al1 over the world. Tapies, on ment that seems to be not the work of His recent work has gradually acquired the basis of a magical figura- man but of the ages of his countless nakedness and emptiness, synthesis tive art, introduced lnformalism into our agents... Everything is what it appears and formal brevity, which are translated country, used mixed procedures of al1 to be and, furthermore, a symbol that into a state of spiritual deliquescence. kinds (sand, cloth, strawl, as well as must be apprehended and known, not . During the sixties he continued deciphered. to work in the sphere of research; the The way he contemplates what is real ... What are we told about landscape by ~rincipalinnovations were his political through art lies outside the mainstream large, lobulate forms that catch the flush references with the use of symbols and of today's culture, in which matter, of the dense ochre space on which they words written on the canvas or other viewed in its possible opacity, reveals an seem to float? What idea of vegetation support. Tapies makes use of the usual impoverishment of our vision. In spite of do we get from a large inflated brush- range of tones, where colour is used as the widespread recognition Tapies has stroke or a slender outline, one pushing, a support, but basically as a medium. achieved and the influence he has had the other cutting the infinitely empty His calligraphy, his rich graphic rep- on the art of our time, he is as much thicknesses? Which is the house, or is it, ertory, the influence of the space, the inside it as outside. Just as our view of perhaps, a tree? The stretched tension sensuous treatment of the material and the the everyday world would be different reaches right to the edges... refined use of the chromatic ranges are without him, so would art today if this Al1 this is understanding of the land- a demonstration of his mastery of an great Catalan artist had not taught us to scape, an understanding of landscape as a expressive language that confers on the see reality with a vision that is as pictorial equivalent, linked to a sense of spectator a broad sense of dialogue ancient as it is new... monochromy, of emptiness and minute- and of profound introspective identifi- ness, which has given Joan Hernandez cation. J. Corredor-Matheos Pijuan a solitary position, as praise- worthy as it is impregnable, in the Cata- Ion art world. His long pictorial career, .. . The pictures in this exhibition do not covering more than thirty years, is remove us from the world we know. based on the idea of a contemporary view These surfaces are signs that are fami- of landscape: a living alchemy of mea- liar to us and at the same time myste- surable space. rious. Teaching us to see that which lies His brushes laboriously travel the before us and which we have not seen space, they clean it, they fill it with exquisi- is a merit of Antoni Tapies. Really teness and sobriety, they reinstate a seeing means knowing. In doing so we profound and subtle speciality. Land- interpret the meaning of materials, Trained at the Escola d'Arts Aplicades i scape as a theme is no more than the forms, signs. In this great artist, the anti- Oficis Artístics Llotja and the Escola Su- coupling of the sensitive vision and its nomy between art-nature and art-figu- perior de Belles Arts, in Barcelona, he abstract idea, the alliance between the rative reality is not, as in other cases, founded the Grup Sílex in 1956. In image sensed and the senses filled with irreducible. Certainly, entering a picture 1957 he travelled to Paris, where he colour, the orchestration of the sign with is like going through the looking-glass; come into direct contact with the expe- the whole space... but quite unlike the symmetry Alice rience of lnformalism and studied en- found in her wonderful adventure. From graving and lithography at the College Teresa Blanch coincides with the presence of what which are the result of the pure scherna- would be called ritual incisions, little tization of the surroundings. mutilations, an exhibition of reiections that at the same time are trophies; a XAVIER CORBERÓ panoply in which the first victims are the .. . Veiled presences that take place at Barcelona, 1935 weapons exhibited themselves. This re- the point of the idea and that show fined con frontation o f opposites is what themselves as a gentle passing are the After stud~ingat the Escola Massana, makes Corberó's art something unique forms that appear in the painting of Ra- Corberó went to London in 1955 where insofar as it is unmistakable ... fols-Casomada; presences frozen in he fed on the constructivist ideas that a brief instant, like those that are characterize his work. At the beginning Luis Goytisolo glimpsed during the contemplation of a of the sixties the chief features of his light slumber or in the first moments of work could already be glirnpsed: styli- a dream. Real presences freed of their zation and refinement in the most rigo- matter and their outline; the matter and rous architectural tradition. But, over the outline imposed by the reality of the and above the lyrical aestheticism that waking hour. Presences redeemed of al1 invades his work, the dorninant sign of the attributes recognized by convention his production is still the beautiful, and protected from the weight of their painstaking workrnanship. dark inexistente. Corberó's sculptures are conceived with ALBERT Presences full o f reminiscence; sharp- a refined formal synthesis which gives RAFOLS-CASAMADA ening reason and revealing to the imagi- thern the quality of sublimation; works Barcelona, 1923 nation the reality concealed behind the with shiny, polished surfaces that be- appearance. Presences that are not come etherial and that seern to dot Trained in literature and art, he has what they are and not what they ap- the space with stars of light. worked in the field of painting and peor to be; that suggest other pres- poetry. His painting, which was figura- entes, other worlds, realities with their tive in an initial stage, inherits the colou- corresponding place in the perfect space .. . "Elegance ", a word before which it is rist sense of the fauvists. In 1950 he of the idea. Presences which seem to worth stopping as regards Corberó's travelled to Paris, where he lived frorn come from far away and which, estab- work, in the same way that the sculptor 1953-54. During the period between lishing themselves in the midst of the suspends his activity for a moment when 1957 and 1963 he abandoned post- reality of things, show how much of he comes across some particularly sig- cubist figurative art and introduced a them is real and what their true sub-- nificant vein in the stone, convinced he structuring of forrn, a period which was stance is. Perhaps a substance like that of has hit on the shape he was looking for. followed by his own interpretation of dreams, yet made matter on the canvas, Elegance, in fact, is the common de- Inforrnalisrn, which he enriched with the with its form and colour, and charged nominator both of the apparently most introduction of the obiect of the collage with evocation and harmony. contradictory features of his personality process (1964-68). Frorn 1960 to 1977 Albert Rafols-Casamada has seen, has -humour and seriousness, tact and his work was accornpanied by a theore- perceived and has felt reality. pragmatism- and of the most marked tical reflection open to conceptualism characteristics of his work. In this, ele- with an exploration of the pictorial Antoni Mari gonce is not so much a result of form as space, formats, etc. A final period between of the cruel conjugation of the form with 1978 and 1986 ernphasized colour and the material expressing it. Thus steel is added flexibility to the picture's compo- treated as though it were glass, marble sitional structure within an abstract art as though it were steel, basalt as containing references to the landscape though it were bronze and bronze as and the obiect. though it were plastic. Recently his painting has been refined Is there anything more fragile than what to the utmost and is subrnerged in a is hardest? Between the goldsmith and space which is devoid of al1 elernents. the designer of sophisticated weapons, His purely mental landscapes are con- the perilousness of their forms often structed in harrnonious planes of colour GUINOVART. METROP, 1988. MlXED TECHNIQUE ON WOOD. 260 x 2 1 O CM

FREDERIC AMAT. NOCTURN ROIG. 1990. MlXED TECHNIQUE. 187 x 187 CM SUBIRACHS. MIL.LENARI. 1989. CALATORAO AND TRAVERTINE. 57 x 47 x 25 CM

VllADECANS NOCTURN, 1991. MIXED TECHNIQUE ON PAPER PASTE. 195 x 185 CM presented by the materials he tears has been exploring and emphasizing from it to incorporate into the picture or some of the symbols from earlier sculpture, and the freedom of organis- periods, stressing the dramatism of his ing them in compositions of a marked work and underlining the dialectics of JOSEP GUINOVART critica1 nature. That's why it's out of opposites between life and death, es- Barcelona, 1927 place, in his case, to speak of objets trou- pecially. Flies, block birds and severed vés that are shown on account of their bulls' heads emphasize the sacrifice Trained at the Escola d'Arts i Oficis purely aesthetic or anti-aesthetic va- and the offering, by means of highly (Llotja) and at the FAD Art School, at the lues, but of obiects and materials that tactile and sensuous work with paper beginning of the fifties he made contact are representative of a situation he paste and wax. with the 1st lndependent Art Salon, the hopes to ward off by organising them in Cercle Maillol and the experimental new groupings that change each one's cycles directed by Angel Morsa. After previous function -aggressive, con- ...He wrote when he painted by hand. an ingenuous period that led to an ima- cealing or inert. As he poured forth syncretic apparitions ginar~,superreal and magical reality, a This is an art that is opposed to al1 of a signic and archaic writing in an visit to Madrid introduced him to the imitation o f crystallization and that imaginary world of mind and abstract Castilian landscape. Between 1956 and never loses sight of the original inspiring icons taken from life and art, al1 the new 1958 there was a noticeable wish to magma, so that the work tends to go images broke out of the narrative experiment and to weigh up matter on beyond the obiectual limits imposed by course of the iourneys: Yucatán, Oaxaca, the basis of abstract informalist trends. tradition and ideally invades the exte- Mexico, Manhattan, Brazil, Egypt, Haiti, He took up the processes of collage rior space. In this way, the artist's in- Morocco, Sicily -geodesic points of a and . At the end of the six- terior time, represented by the trans- mental nomadism, suffocating and ties his work underwent a tendency to forming reorganisation of the materials bloodstained. These places of pilgrim- reflect human, political and social issues. -carried out through impatience more age for the body, so pure, had offered During the seventies he turned to the than through disdain-gives rise to an themselves in their impurity. And there search for three-dimensionality, investi- almost explosive tension between the he had discovered the inexhaustible gations that led to the practice of the two spaces.. . ~ualitiesof an exceptional chromatic environment. The retrospective exhibi- palette, more natural than invention, re- tion of his work held at the Tecla Sala Angel Crespo membrance, celebration, offering, sac- Metropolitan Cultural Centre at I'Hospi- rifice, dread and enigma. It was the talet de Llobregat in December 1989 concupiscence of the eye. And in this and January 1990 offered a reflection way was born in him, at the some time, on this creator's personal universe. His a writing that was weightless and work has earned him the National Prize earthly, of languoge and of matter, for Plastic Arts. anthropological and scenographic, of labourers and virtual. When he tried to FREDERIC AMAT fix, in a single unit of separations, what ... ln his impassioned and continuous Barcelona, 1952 had become traces of the memory of polemic with the irksome cultural and humanity and luminous moments of his social reality around him, Josep Guinovart lnterested in a symbolic form of figura- biography, his gaze delighted in calm stirs up a tangle of obiects, materials tive art, his work takes its initial inspira- flight, in the sume way as the irreversi- and situations, which he sees -as he tion from exotic and primitive cultures bility, chemical and instamic, of the nu- told me in a recent conversation- not as and shows the impact of colours, forms merical reversible, in the some way as chaos but as magma to be moulded. Far and materials from popular art. Festi- semen turned into blood and blood into from positioning himself on the fringe of vals, magic, rituals, and ceremonies milk.. . reality, then, the artist plunges into it in characterize his canvases, marked by search of a synthesis of necessity, re- work with primitivist roots. Recently he Vicenc Altaió tive of the great creators of our century. of visual contrasts and paradoxes. But Viladecans has designed his own. he is always characterized by a great Every picture a phrase, a chapter of a technical mastery and painstaking for- JOAN message that is renewed page by mal structuring. PERE VILADECANS page, an allegory of its passing. Each Subirachs is the artist who has cons- Barcelona, 1948 new sign, each obiect, each letter, tantly brought art into the street, while colour, figure or footprint, an argu- fiercely defending the participation of He exhibited for the first time in 1969, ment, and unifying them: the support, the public in artistic creation. with a very baroque work which later the obiectual condition of painting. The developed towards a dematerialization tactile and corporeal dimension. The in which the main thing was to empha- testimony of a constant self-manifesta- His sculpture has played both with form size the relations between the elements, tion, without forgetting the reference to and concept, and has followed its own more than the elements themselves. man, to the artist as a thinker who with path, from an alien avant-gardism to From then on, his work became more his painting is the vehicle for the medi- fashions and mass artistic trends. After lyrical, more poetic, more laconic, giving tative state of the gaze. his abstract period, so emblematic of prominence to the obiect, until he the new culture that was breaking out of arrived at the synthesis of his Poemes Josep-Miquel Garcia the remains of official conventionalism, centrats, highly organised in elemental he reintroduced figurative art in the six- and even symmetrical constructive pat- ties, but he did so without returning to terns. The treatment of the matter, with troditional concepts, combining dream, layers of paper paste, and concern for volumetric and literary elements, mixing the texture and the relief structure are materials and techniques. By way of still his chief obiectives. example, he included painting in his He has exhibited individually at the sculptures, which often surpassed their most important museums and galleries JOSEP M. SUBIRACHS natural limits and approached the realm and has taken part in many group exhi- Barcelona, 1925 of architecture, an art the sculptor has bitions. always said he misses. Josep M. Subirachs is one of the best- Sometimes you might say that Subirachs known and most widely recognized Cat- is a cold realist, with a marked element ... With signs, Viladecans signs the style, alan artists, on both a national and an of mythology in his work, something the identification with a mirror of his international level. which has led him to make coostant ref- own expression. He builds the alphabet Until 1951 he reflected the influence of erences to classical and Renaissance to describe everything from silence to the Noucentisme which had predomin- forms and contents, to reappraise the cries, the pictorial word that communi- ated during his training, although after essential role of his sculptures' ped- cates the senses, and argues them. this date we can see a clear tendency estal~,often making them an inseparable Painting offers the pages of an open towards a stylization of form which was part of the whole, and at the sume time book, to be filled with fragments of the to lead him into abstraction, to return, it has led him to allow free rein to the most intimate remembrance. more recently, to realism. His mature eroticism in his work, in which on obelisk Within these exclusively pictorial limits, work, which is sober and complex, is can be strikingly phallic and at the some Viladecans outlines his signographic structured in a play of contrasts and time have an impressive and tranquil language, and from it shapes stories, complements which takes place both on classical presence. .. poems and pictorial evocations. At last the thematic level and on the level of the his freedom has been recognized, this externa1 appearance, often combining Francesc Fontbona universe of signs that distinguish his dis- different materials, negative and posit- course and diversify expression. To loy ive figures, sequences in series, dis- the foundations for style, a terminology placements, classical elements, etc., in a of one's own, has come to be the obiec- constant dialogue of opposites, a game MOISESVILLELIA. MCYIL, 1980-82. CANE, 120 x 420 x 420 CM DOSSIER I

axiom conceived as a postulate to iden- wire ...1, but also with organic matter (a tify the eloquent silence that inhabits his marrow, a cactus...). In this sense, this formal abstruseness with corporal re- investigation, a forerunner of arte po- presentations that ignore the laws of vera, helped him to discover the mat- SERGl AGUILAR gravity and only respond to the inten- erial that characterizes him: the bamboo Barcelona, 1946 tions of the subject that makes them. cane. From his canes he makes mobiles Matter and form are the syntactic ele- that take shape in the air and hang in He studied at the Escola Massana ments he articulates out of his abstrac- the void, and renounces, in the end, the d'Arts Aplicades and at the Conserva- tion, following the Aristotelian model, to possibility of sculpture. An exhibition of tori de les Arts del Llibre, in Barcelona. organise a world system: the matter is Villelia's work in 1960 inaugurated the Since 1972 he has devoted himself ex- space; the form, materialization of time Museum of Contemporary art provisio- clusively to sculpture, using bronze, without causality, in its infinity. The nally installed in the Coliseum. brass, steel and concrete, and later, space provides the surfaces, and time pro- Belgian block marble and iron. His work duces the gesture. The space can never reveals a certain minimalist influence as be the sume because of the immutable .. . The striking emergence in the fifties of regards the reduction of form to a mini- action of time on it. But each piece, Moises Villelia's work -unusual sculp- mum of expression and he works on the regardless of the size, is a compact, tures, exuberant, imaginative, rich in basis of an organic geometry. The force irreplaceable unit... ideas, difficult and unique- was a real of his sculpture lies in the tensions, incli- revelation in Catalan cultural circles. nations, cracks and balancing move- Menene Gras Balaguer The fabulous inventiveness of his plastic ments. forms, but more especially the skillful From the very beginning, geometry has manipulation of bamboo, a material been the basis for the structures of his easily available to Villelia at his home in rigid volumes, which, treated with subtle Cabrils, caused an unforgettable im- formal purity, are constructed by means pact. This sculptor was really one of the of primary sculptures and formal ele- first people to turn his attention to hum- ments, always recreated through an or- ble materials, one of the first people to der that never becomes closed and ra- choose, in the second half of the cen- tional -quite the contrary, it is in cons- tury, as well as such unusual materials tant dialogue: sudden breaks, delicate MOISESVILLELIA as bamboo and toothpicks, organic ma- balances, unexpected shifts, chance in- Barcelona, 1928 terial~like a cactus, a bone or a cisions, dislocated ioins ... in a balanced marrow. conjugation of tensions and of explora- Apart from the early pieces, containing His love for everything he has managed tion of accidents. stylized figures with a certain modernist to surround himself with certainly goes influence, as could be seen in 1954 deep. This makes up his world, so when he exhibited for the first time at unique, rich and personal, gathered in ... The archaeology of each of Sergi the Museu de Mataró, it would be true -finally- at Molló, on the vertical face of Aguilar's sculptures is revealed in the to soy that since 1954 his sculpture has the mountain where he has built his home. foundation of the form and in the sensi- been fully informalist, as was shown by Villelia is more than a pioneer. He is tive appearance it takes on, its end his 1956 exhibition, which made people one of those honest, upright, creative being none other than itself. The form, talk of a Mataró group made up of artists who do honour to a country. He as re-presentation, and therefore in- Villelia and four painters. He took part is a sculptor. With no need for adiec- cluding at the same time the simulation of in the October Salon that year, where tives. There is no need to classify him. un intelligible world which is absent his experimental work underwent a re- With him, Catalan sculpture reaches a from the obiectual world. His activity sounding transformation when he de- leve1 of originality, emotion and interest consists in forming for form's sake, free cided to leave behind him the trade he which has rarely been achieved in the from a discourse whose immediate ref- mastered so well and launch into expe- art of our age. erence is the notion of the limit. The ori- rimentation. He works with inorganic gin of his work lies in the geometrical materials (stones, rusty iron, string, Maria Lluisa Borras RAFAEL BARTOLOZZI. VENDEDOR DE GLOBOS, 1988. 011 ON CANVAS. 170 x 2 15 CM

MONTSERRAT GUDIOL. UNTITLED, 1 99 1.011 ON CANVAS. 195 x 1 30 CM CARLOS PAZOS. &D~NDEESTA iA FARMACIAP. 1987. ASSEMBLAGE OF OBJECTS, 1 18 x 65 x 27 CM I DOSSIER

un expression of the face, a gesture of that fight for dominance; the geornetri- the hands. cal and the organic, restraint and Montserrat Gudiol's painting is classical growth. If the body is geometrical, the MONTSERRAT painting not only because it retrieves skin is organic; if the structure is built up GUDIOL Renaissance aesthetic approaches and according to strict order and rnethod, Barcelona 1933 uses ancient pictorial techniques, but the musculature gradually disrnembers because it makes man the centre of in- the form in a clear process of abstrac- Outside the rnainstrearn of the trends in terest of her discourse. tion. vogue at any given mornent, Montserrat Montserrat Gudiol's painting is modern Gudiol's work has always been char- because it looks into the spirit of the acterized by a marked symbolisrn. Her people of today and because it makes ... True to a series of convictions, he has figures emerge frorn interior arnbits, re- a personal synthesis of Realism and In- seen a wide range of stereotypes and presenting scenes that are frozen in formalism.. . fashions pass before him, though slight time, by means of which she deepens phases can certainly be mude out within the world of feelings. If in the fifties her Francesc Miralles his loyalty. work hinted at a surreal vision, the de- The group of works to be presented in veloprnent of her language has rnaint- Seville is a continuation of a formalpuri- ained the mythical and supra-realist at- fication of those more or less figurative mosphere of- its beginnings, irnpreg- iconographic resorts of a surreal, ob- nated with a striking air of rnystery. The sessive, alternately dramatic and ironic loneliness, pain and anguish of the hu- EDUARD type that were commonplaces of the rnan being are the rnain focus of her ARRANZ-BRAVO most familiar Arranz-Bravo. discourse, a fully realist discourse that Barcelona, 1 94 1 A process of purification that started to hinges on the heads and hands, ele- take shape after the break in the part- rnents of rnaximurn expressiveness, He belongs to the generation of artists nership the painter had kept up for while the bodies are diluted. who, at the beginning of the sixties, more than a decade with Rafael Barto- reacted to the language of abstraction lozzi, and whose birth was announced and lnforrnalisrn to shape a basically in the splendid series entitled Pantocra- .. .Montserrat Gudiol's painting repre- figurative expression which takes draw- tor, or in equally exemplary pieces such sents a clean break in Catalan post-war ing as its academic basis and which as Nord, Corasón de .oro and Father art, because she has wanted to venture returns to the hurnan figure as a formal estirnat arnic, al1 dated between 1988 into a world people don't usually linger proposition and as a reflection of the and 1989. in, the world of feelings. At a time when social dirnension. He brings together images and lines, painting was concentrating on formal If, during the seventies, in an explosive sequences and sketches, in the manner aspects, in the years when artists com- expansion, Arranz-Bravo delighted in of a spring where the artist collects the mitted themselves to social struggle, this the use of formal elernents, during the water he then splashes over al1 his Barcelona painter concentrated on in- eighties he synthesized and sirnplified work. Splashes in which we sense the terpreting the spirit. cornposition, in an interior about- powerful beat of a heart that long ago Montserrat Gudiol's characters are turn which has brought hirn back, in his noticed how a certain measured,com- theatrical characters, because they are latest work, to the complex networks of fortable rhythm followed after the acce- situated in un unreal or fictitious setting, lines and shapes that dilute the iinage, lerated arrhythmia provoked by a late because they make gesture, expres- at the sarne time as it is fragrnented and alarm-clock one supposedly tranquil sion, their element of communication. As broken down, carved up and dismem- dawn. The loud heartbeats resound in the ancient Greek tragedies, as in bered. powerfully here... mime, her characters reveal their state The artist seems to want to keep a of mind and explain it to us by means of balance between the two opposite poles Luis Casado guarda, Projecte Dolc and Superart. jects. Memories and experiences tinged A sympathy, furthermore, whose formal with rnelancholy, with sensuality, and manifestation consists in a "revitaliza- steeped in a deliberate kitsch, appear tion of figurative expressionism", a in his assernblages and constructions in RAFAEL BARTOLOZZI reading and analysis of artists like a highly critica1 poetry that is halfway Parnplona, 1943 Francis Bacon and a renewed interest between beauty and ugliness. in man, nature and his surroundings. After exhibiting for several seasons Bartolozzi's painting, in its rapid evolu- alongside Eduard Arranz-Bravo and or- tion, leads to an accelerated synchronic ... Carlos Pazos defies the order of the ganising various artistic activities with reading, it becomes more etheriol and conventional in his leap across borders, hirn, in 1982 Rafael Bartolozzi presen- diaphanous, it is automatic painting, it in his obsession with making his life the ted work which was proof of a definitive reiects the instant and neo-figurative contents of his art and with his unshaka- break with his previous way of working. formation to lose itself in the world of ble look of the eterna1 rebel, something Frorn this rnornent on he re-ernerged dreams and return to the earlier, intu- strange, or at least scarce, at a time of with a clearly defined personality, but itive expressiveness of the child, follow- generalized ambition. Because Pazos one that reaffirrned his initial language. ing the cycle o f life. This world o f signs -paradoxical as it muy seem- has been Since then, his work has gradually ac- is different from Miró's childlike but more faithful to his cause than many of quired a certain syrnbolisrn which in surreal world. Bartolozzi creates out of those who at the beginning of the se- sorne pieces connects with a pseudo- real events and transforms them venfies raised the flag of art at the ser- pre-Raphaelisrn. through a personal reading into a pat- vice of the great ideals. With his aura of The deliberate arnbiguity Bartolozzi in- tern which is the expression of his cur- Decadence, which led him in 1976 to troduces into his creative work is under- rent enthusiastic search for sincerity ... proclaim "I'm going to make myself a lined by the cornbination of different star", Pazos has become more deter- rnaterials, which at times reminds one of Joan Abelló mined in his defence of art for art's sake gold- and silver-work and popular art. and more coherent in his aesthetic Forrns rnetamorphosed in the uncons- ideas than many of the artists of his ge- cious, surfacing in the form of figures, neration. landscapes and atrnospheres, decon- Carles Pazos's poetic is the result and textualized in relation to time and the logical continuation of and space. : both of them brought to the art of the twentieth century the libera- CARLES PAZOS tion of representation with their idea of .. . Bartolozzi began his painting in ab- Barcelona, 1949 the obiet trouvé, which they show us in stract art and collage, but it was after his its own right, as Duchamp does, or com- contact with the group from the Escola In the course of his long artistic career bining two or more objects, as was to de Belles Arfs in Barcelona, more than he has developed a complete rnyth- happen with Surrealism. Our artist gave twenty-five years ago now, thot he ology on personal objects. During the rise to a new version, that of objects really started his long artistic career in eighties, the practice of body art, as that make up a certain scenography, neo-figurative art, with evident influ- carried out by this artist, led to a sculp- because they don't reach the leve1 of an ences from American Pop Art and the late tural oeuvre with a powerful poetic installation and they aren't really sculp- Surrealists. In the last ten years, there is charge, centred rnainly on the aesthe- tures either. also a certain ltalian influence to be tics of the everyday obíect, which built Carlos Pazos loves his memories, he seen in his work, as expressed in his up a personal language as though it lives to remember and fk these moments sympathy for the ltalian critic Achille Bo- were a private diary. In this sense, he for eternity. nito Oliva and the movements he orga- transfigures life through the ironic and nises and/or originates: Transavant- sarcastic rnanipulation of everyday ob- Victoria Cornbalia Dexeus

21 DOSS-IER

J.J. THARRATS. VIBRACIONS. 1987. MlXED TECHNIQUE ON CANVAS. 100 x 8 1 CM

XAVlER GRAU. UNTITLED, 199 1 . ACRYLIC ON CANVAS. 8 1 x 5 1 CM FRANCESC ARTIGAU. MERCAT DE SANTA CATERINA. 1988. 011 ON CANVAS. 170 x 300 CM

CUIXART. PAS A DOS. 1 99 1 . )N CANVAS. 73 x 92 CM tion of colours, in rich contrasts, make there are fine exarnples in this exhibit. up a work of a volcanic dime.nsion, in At the beginning of the sixties, Cuixart which painting disturbs other elements once more introduced figurative ele- to transform them into signs inserted in ments into his work and moved towards J.J. THARRATS a space as personal as it is universal. Pop and neo-Dada ideas. Thus the Girona, 1918 This investigative urge has given him the exorcist figures that emerge from the chance to cultivate a wide variety of dense backgrounds, and the macabre A protagonist of the avant-garde drive artistic techniques. As well as painting dolls, battered and burnt and stuck to- of the art and literary move- and engraving, Tharrats has worked in gether in a collage, belong to this ment, Tharrats has never abandoned mural painting, sculpture, gold and sil- period, a period characterized by gloom the struggle for freedom of action and ver, glass, pottery, tapestry, posters and destruction. for artistic renovation. Following an ini- and scenography, infusing the same ar- Finally, the baroque and neo-modernist tial, more Surrealist period, his magi- tistic language into each procedure. figurative art of recent years offers us cism gradually adrnitted shapeless This capacity for experimentation led sensual, frivolous presences of wornen rnarks and dense, well worked rnatter. him to develop his own technique, his in troubling allegories. Throughout his career he has concen- "maculatures", with which he synth- trated on a very individual style, with esized his investigative capaciiy: he uses, extremely wide registers and conti- transforms or recreates different sup- Cuixart's visit to Paris was of decisive nuous variations, whose strength lies in ports of paper or canvas, he prints on importante for him. He had taken his the wealth of textures, the agility of the them at random over previous prints ... first steps in Barcelona, after discov- rhythrn and 'the distribution of the until accumulation, superimposition and ering the world of the subconscious, colours. transparency result in another plastic through the extraordinary boldnesses At the end of the fifties and beginning reality transmuted by his language... of "dadism" and the magical world of of the sixties, when he concentrated on Surrealism's "rationalized subcons- the period that rnost particularly incides Daniel Giralt-Miracle cious". The Romanesque painting of the on "matteric", tachista and spatialist In- Catalan museums, some aspects of formalism, he carne to the crystallization Catalan Modernism (art nouveaul, and the of his maculatures, or "reiects", a tech- paths followed by chosen forerunners nique in which he combines tradition gave Cuixart's work during that period and the avant-garde. In this respect, the a peculiar tone of magic realism, of re- automatic, spontaneous gesture and fined calligraphies and bold uses of the colour that spreads and expands in colour. a constant eruption over the surface, Cuixart's restlessness, however, soon creates fluctuating, unstable, dynarnic MODEST CUIXART led him on to new experiments. With his forms, which flow magically to the sur- Barcelona, 1925 Set personatges d'exorcisme, which he face in the forrn of signs and colour. exhibited in Paris in 1962, and the con- The figuratively oneiric iconography in- troversial exhibition at René Metros the herited frorn Surrealisrn and cornmon to following year (called "the do11 exhibi- ... Tharrats delights equally in a frog- al1 the rnembers of the Dau al Set group tion", because of the obiects used in ment suggestive of the microcosm (1948-1 951') is rnanifested in a very some of the works), the language ac- (sand, rocks, lava, etc.) and in suc- personal way in Cuixart's work, through quired a new dimension. ceeding in reflecting the macrocosm funi- a rnagical, symbolist world with rich in- Cuixart's ceramic work shows his sculp- verse, planets, galaxies, etc.). Both of ner realities. After this period he moved tural skill, his sense of the third dimen- these dimensions are present in his towards an informalist approach within sion, of volume ond space, as well as work. an unmistakable abstract expressionisrn his very personal use of colour and his The richness of the carefully worked of material exuberance. attention to the material... textures, the agility of the constantly Scratching, scraping and dripping are moving rhythms, and the subtle distribu- techniques which he uses and of which Cesáreo Rodriguez-Aguilera 1 DOSSIER 1

guous and perversely vital condition, of exhibitions and taken part in a nurnber a predisposition to live in uncertainty. In of significant group shows. it there are intersecting and interrupted sequences that fix events: the expres- siveness of an outline, the pictorial ani- ...Xavier Grau is one of those painters mation of a printed dress, the sensuality for whom painting, in its own right, be- of a skin in the sun, characters in a comes an inexhaustible source of new Trained at the Escola Superior de Belles garden, people communicating, couples ideas and therefore of new painting. Arts and the Escola Llotja, in Barcelona, running N, the ruin, sporadic images of For Grau, painting is a vital necessity; it he first becarne known publicly in the a television screen, travel notes, free is a requirement of life, of the intellect, sixties, when, after Inforrnalisrn, there evocations of Greek or Etruscan art, of existence; painting is creation and as was a certain return to figurative art. He market or bar scenes, bodies on the such is the ideal means by which to took part in the rnovernent of the Estam- beach and Mediterranean landscapes. communicate with the world and also to pa Popular Catalana, which exhibited A promiscuous figurative expression discover oneself. Painting, more than at the Galeria Belarte (Barcelona, with a touch of humour and irony, vehe- representation or symbolization of 1965). His figurative art is expressed mently accumulative and communica- something outside the painter, is more through a spirit of social chronicle tive, in which, as has been said, the re- than anything expression of his "1': a cloaked in irony and a critica1 vision, docu- covery of the meaning of life and of his- language without sounds and rich in rnentarily interpreting the social rnornent tory, experience and memory become images, which has everything and no- by rneans of an alrnost caricaturesque indistinguishable.. . thing to do with the surroundings that sense of everyday ieality. generate it and make it possible. Artigau's series of paintings and draw- Miquel Molins i Nubiola From his colourist and gestural composi- ings in which the life of the street is tions of the early eighties, tormented by reflected becorne sequences punctu- a subtle and sometimes invisible figura- ated by flashes that freeze movernent, tive presence which was far removed capturing the singularity within the so- from the support-surface abstract art cial whole. Grau had practised up to the end of the seventies, which led him to take part in exhibitions like "Per una crítica de la ...Since his beginnings as a painter with pintura" and to collaborate in the group the Estampa Popular group in the six- XAVIER GRAU Trama, to his striking compositions of ties, we might soy that Artigau has tried Barcelona, 1 95 1 today, we hardly find a hint of real his hand at Pop N7 a broad sense of the change in what we might call, not with- word: in design, in the mixture of dif- He appeared on the artistic scene in the out inverted commas, style; a style, ferent images and in the sophisticated rnid-seventies and, in his own very per- however, which, rather than repeating forms of presentation, but especially in sonal way, took up the lessons of Anto- images like a mirror, rather than be- his ambiguous -and 1 would go so far ni Tapies and Arnerican abstraction. coming affected or devoid of content, has as to say amoral- adhesion to an ad- His pictorial work, which belongs to a successfully mude the canvas an intense vertising and urban culture which is con- field of abstract art where gesture and field of expressions and truths that for demned to a life contaminated by a colour are the essential elements, is him are exactly that, and for us too.. . sur feit o f con flicting ethics. His style characterized by dense atrnospheres, seems to accept that description is es- frorn which fragrnented figures and ob- Anna Guasch sentially irony, and that elegant des- jects ernerge, steeped in an unreal, ro- cription is persuasion. rnantic light. The gestural and sponta- The surface of the picture becomes a neous brushstroke, alongside powerful, space in which disparate elements come lively colours, characterize a work that together. It isn't the definition of a spe- is warrn and dense in its formal configu- cific significate, so much as of an ambi- ration. He has held important individual TOM CARR RED WIX, 1991 PAINTED WOOD. 200 x 195 x 100 CM

MARCEL MART~.OSUM. 1989 BRONZE, 54 x 26 x 17 CM ANTONI LLENA. GROC, BlANC 1 BlANC TRANSPARFM, 1987 COLLAGE, 126 x 1 26 CM

UIM~S.VANITAS BLAU, 011 ON CANVAS, 1 30 x 1 30 CM DOSSIER

Looking back after forty years, Marcel ent period, with a lighter, far more Martí's sculpture shows no evolutions; it ethereal and dynarnic type of sculpture. has gone frorn the sharp-edged, angu- Even so, those studies of perspective, lar forms of flat or geometric volumetry that constant anarnorphous distortion, MARCEL MART~ to rounded forms with protuberances those shifts of axes and volurnes, that Alvear, Argentina, 1925 one could cal1 organic, but his work has feeling for archetypical geornetrical never been imitative, in spite of its forrns now condense in volurnes that are One of the generation of artists who search for expression, the expression irnposing but do not dorninate the belonged t8 the second Catalan avant- that culture has poured out over the space. garde, Marcel Martí has given groups, ages. In his previous constructions, which took schools and fashions a wide berth, and During the process of creation of his us back to an ancestral post with concentrated on a creative develop- concrete images, Marcel Martí knows Towers of Babel, ziggurats, mastabas, rnent characterized at al1 times by the how to collect and put together the pyrarnids, rarnps, pinnacles..., Torn Carr constant dialogue between instinct and compositive geometrical structure with frequently concentrated on the theme of reflection, between what can be felt the schematic reductionism of minirnal steps, of useless staircases, drawing out and what can be known. art, or else he goes from the cube to his spirals and curves to the unlikely lirnit His work has gradually evolved to- morbid organicism, dense and full of of leaving thern hanging in rnid-air wards an abstract art which neverthe- vivid meanings, though these allusions without leading anywhere. less rnaintains references to reality and are never translatable into a living vis- which is expressed as organic forrns, cerality that limits the projective possibi- always extracted frorn nature, which lities and the freedom with which the ...In his early works, the luminous forms are based on the study of rnorphologies work can be grasped. distorted by reflection in mirrors or the frorn the anthropornorphic, biological Marcel Martí's sculpture swings be- obliquely projected shadows activated and even geological world. Figures, tween geometrical composition and or- the architecture of the exhibition space characters, toterns ... becorne syrnbols ganic nature, which allows him to cap- at the same time as they questioned the with a monumental vocation in his ture an idea and live it according to the certainty of one's perception. Later on, hands. intensity and to his entirely personal the anamorphic procedure was exten- The constant formal tension arising frorn needs, and al1 this at the time and in the ded to include signs, symbols, images the rhythms, rnasses, concavities, con- place that correspond... and colours, al1 drawn by the high reso- vexities, planes, ernptinesses and full- lution of the luminous surroundings. nesses is perfectly sustained thanks to Arnau Puig The immateriality of light is reploced by the irnpeccable technical work with the the solid outlines of wood, twisted or different rnaterials used (wood, bronze, curved to an impossible degree. rnarble, stone, polyester, glass fibre, Tom Carr looks into the inherent free- iron, etc.), the exquisitely aerodynarnic dom of the genuine configurative pro- finish and the rich chrornatic treatrnent cess, rnagnifying a multidirectional dia- of the surfaces, elernents that give the lectic that contains in its unpredictable work of Marcel Marti this plastic soli- amalgam al1 kinds of relations between dity. the artistic elements. In his latest work, a certain simplification has taken place, TOM CARR at the some time os the presence of ...On the paths of the world and of his Tarragona, 1956 very simple forms is emphasized. Nev- own life, Marcel Martí realised that ertheless, the importante of the scale what was apparently fleeting were Torn Carr's experirnents range frorn the of perception and especially the rela- really intangible presences, some of early epherneral and irnrnaterial proiec- tive positions of the pieces are under- them pleasant, others irksome, most of tions with fleeting rays of light on archi- lined more forcefully and with care not to them distressing. Because of his own tectural elernents, the first constructions fa11 into any kind of gratuitous rhetoric. particular idiosyncracy, he decided to worked out on paper with bars of It is as though the artist were inviting the materialize them al1 in three dimensions, graphite and the familiar architectural spectator to realise that true plasticity something that over time has been built structures in wood suggesting irnaginary lies in the means of creation and not so up and demonstrated in his sculpture. buildings and rnonurnents, to the pres- much in the motives, as if he were claiming a territory with a subjectivity neous and decontextualizing paradigm itive return to expressionist figurative of intense but meagre expression that that characterizes our age. painting was marked by a very singular convention usually gives little consid- The choice of material is as important and personal stamp. In 1975 he moved eration to.. . for an artist creating a collage as that to New York, a city he was to share with of the subiect-matter for the painter. Barcelona for a long time. On the basis Gloria Moure The fact that Llena works with paper is of his mastery of al1 plastic art's re- therefore significant: his work takes on sources, Llimós's recent work belongs an obvious air of fragility and obsoles- within a hieratic figurative art, coloured cence. But these bits of paper, which with a certain Mediterranean archaism have been stuck together and trimmed, which he has also introduced into his also seemed to have been recycled sculptural language. from an earlier use, which gives his work a sense of permanence and dura- bility that contrasts with the first impres- ...1 propose two ways of looking at a sion. We are looking at an ambiguous painter like Robert Llimós and his rela- ANTONI LLENA oeuvre which once again occupies a tions with the real or imagined world Barcelona, 1942 fringe position and which therefore can around him: as a coniurer or as a stray not be assimilated or "tagged" in one dog, in the some emblematic sense that A self-taught artist, from 1966 to 1969, line or another. one could see Picasso as a harlequin or approximately, he formed part of a This ambiguity is what allows us to un- saltimbanque, or that -as a dog- the conceptual universe fully integrated in derstand Llena's work beyond al1 for- poet Dylan Thomas was able to imagine the spirit of arte povera. His experi- malism. This artist's work is anti-formal, himself in his autobiography Portrait of ments are amongst the earliest and it turns its back on style. His pieces from the Artist as a Young Dog. These of most interesting of those that took place the eighties can not be ascribed to a course are allegories or figures which during the sixties in relation to this poor constructivist tradition, and neither can they themselves, Llimós and Picasso, art and with the ephemeral nature of his current work be associated with the have built up through their frequent use the materials used. modern traditions of automatism. .. of the respective topics. In the first case, His work was based on shadows drawn that of the harlequin, we can suppose, on the wall, paper sculptures, boxes Manuel J. Boria-Villel according to Jean Starobinski, that the that have to be destroyed to see the poet or artist identified himself with it in work, paintings with talcum powder, the Baudelarian sense of "the actor who etc. This period became gradually more conceals a desperate soul beneath his radicalized until it took up a decidedly triumph and his pretence happiness". critica1 stance which led him to volunta- One essential aspect of Llimós's paint- rily abandon any kind of public showing ing is the strange behaviour of obiects of his art, iust at the time of the great and people in his works. The space, explosion in conceptual art in general. which is barely defined, usually adopts At present, he cuts up and sticks to- ROBERT LLIMÓS an attitude of indifference to them, or, if gether pieces of paper as the extension of Barcelona, 1943 you like, one of neutrality, which could his particular view of the world of art. almost be described as ironic. It's not Son of the painter Camil Llimós, his strange to fin¿ obiects or people levi- training was initially academic. He studied tating or being strangely and fragmenta- ...Faced with this situation, Antoni Lle- at the Escola de Dibuix Amadeu Prats, rily driven along within this space. And no's artistic production is especially sig- the Escola Massana and the Escola Su- in this space, people can only show nificant, since it is a radical criticism of perior de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi, in themselves through isolated gestures any kind of formalist dogmatism. Even Barcelona. During an initial period coin- and expressions, or, if they appear in when he ioins in the game of art, his ciding with a return to figurative art, in their entirety, they do so with interrup- works still maintain their capacity for the sixties, he practised the new figura- tions that are like hiatuses in their out- opposition, they are not seen indispu- tive art before going on, very briefly, to lines ... tably as art, and therefore get in the a sporadic conceptual expression dur- way of their integration in the heteroge- ing the period 1969-1 973. His defin- Rafael Santos Torroella ZUW. JARWS KIILFR, 1986. MlXED TECHNIQUE ON CARTOON. 1 18.3 X 88,6 CM CLAVE.COLLAGE DEL FAUNE (1985). COLLAGE ON CANVAS. 195 x 130 CM what in their day were called "indivi- dual mythologies", and not because of the well-known case of his now famous Evrugo Mental and al1 the flags, paper ZUSH money, identity documents and other Barcelona, 1946 signs of a private state (of siegel of his own, but because of the uniqueness of By name Albert Porta, and self-taught, the ways in which he acts. Zush's work Half way between poetry and art, Pere- he first made himself known with the is nothing like what we usually think of jaume's work can in a way be seen as exhibition "Al.lucinacions", in 1968, as art, and yet at the sume time it is the heir to 's object-poems. when he adopted the name Zush. In entirely. Everything appears in this Since the first half of the eighties, his 1975 he had his first contact with New ceaseless, unstoppable production investigations have centred basically on York, a city which since then he has -drawings, paintings, books, engravings- the representation of the landscape, shared with his home in Barcelona. His and none of it is subiect to the traditio- thanks to the use of metaphor and the early work belonged to Pop Art nal list of categories. As an artist, Zush manipulation of images as in the collage -phosphorescent, psychedelic, under- turns to his own artistic status -though a technique. While originally his work was ground painting-, at times coinciding reinvented one-, from which al1 his marked by a certain magical surrealist with the surrealist vein of Dau al Set. operations emerge; as a work of art, his influence, it has gradually become far Zush has built up a language of his production appeals to the dynamics of more conceptual and grown away from own, creating an interior, magical world the subiect to establish itself in a dis- the subiect of landscape, demanding a which explores the duality between the course that is personal and autonomous far more direct participation on the part universe as a totality and the world as -in this sense, perpetually autoreferen- of the spectator. an individuality. In this respect, he has tial- which introduces itself without wait- He recently published the essay Lud- creat-ed the State of Zushlandia (1980) ing to be asked, and not so as to take wig-Juiol( 19891. and the Evrugo Mental State (19831. He part in the contextual problems of the took part in the exhibition "Barcelona- productive devices, but to affect the París-New York. El cami de dotze artis- spectator's intellectual sphere, thereby ...From the balcony of modernity, Pere- tes 1960-1980" ( 1985). In becoming a sort of private action -a iaume looks out on the shaken sky of 1989 the Department of Culture of the duel- we could cal1 a brain to brain, an Modernism. Taking up the thread of Generalitat de Catalunya organised the image which, by the way, however re- those who went before him, his view exhibition "Els llibres de Zush", which current, is nevertheless symptomatic of over the realm of dreams has more fo brought together almost all his books a whole way, not only of acting, but, do with the adventure of the late nine- and notebooks, in which he develops basically, of understanding the creative teenth century than with that of the Su- the basis of his whole iconography. act from his original a priori starting per-realism which, in the twenties, ex- point ... plored the guilty inter-war subcons- cious. But in spite of this, there are ...Zush is probably one of the few blood-ties that can't be denied. ln the examples left -and persevering- of Manel Clot urt of Pereiaume you will no doubt find at least a resemblance, a family like- original results in the field of painting, the end of the forties or almost the fif- ness, to Dalí's melting clocks, the almost sculpture, engraving and tapestry. The ties. terrifying expanses of René Magritte or one-to-one fight he maintains with his Clavé has already found his calli- the mysterious monuments of Giorgio work manifests itself in different ways: graphy, his system of signs in which de Chirico. But his primogenital line in the manipulation of the matter and in ornamentalism is no more than a sub- goes back further than this: to Wagner its finish, in the driving strokes of colour iective evaluation by a busybody who and Ludwig, Gaudí and Juiol. from which the pigment runs and drips knows his past as a poster artist. It isn't Let's make no bones about it: the world, dramatically, and also in the printing of ornamentalism. It's a prodigious retina, when al1 is said and done, and in spite a wide range of elements. The repeated as knowledgeable in the structuring of o f everything, is poetry; and Pereiaume use of trompe-l'oeil (optical illusionsl the picture space as in the use of colour, knows it. That's why the landscapes his and of discarded obiects which the pas- a retina that incorporates the "matteric" eyes contemplate become disturbing sage of time has aged and deteriorated from the drama of the experiments with postcards that lead you on breathtak- are other constants in his creative work. which contemporary art and literature ing adventures. Reality and dream, vi- In 1984, in acknowledgement of his show the insecurity on which they des- sion and metaphor. He knows that, at work, he was awarded the Generalitat troy themselves so as to construct them- bottom, the secret of real magic doesn't de Catalunya's Gold Medal. selves. The collage isn't simply a decla- consist in making the dream come true, The retrospective exhibition presented ration of mixed breeding or a hotch- but on the contrary, of making reality at the Palau Robert by the ~e~artme-ntpotch of double-meanings. Collage is become a dream... of Culture at the beginning of 1990 pro- the representation of doubt as to the vided a chance to evaluate his creative meaning of contemporary art, just as in Josep M. Llompart development and the dynamic conti- Clavé the alternation of painting, illus- nuity that characterizes it. tration, theatrical decoration, sculpture and tapestry expresses un urge to search for or find the medium and the space to .. .Mean while, triumphant, totalitarian force the evolution of the languáge. Francoism had the gall to establish un From the poster artist for Hollywood aesthetic by decree, and al1 avant- films that lives on in the memory of the garde experiments were labelled a re- passers-by who were his contempora- sult of the degeneration of art. Clavé Nes, to this seventy-nine-year-old artist ANTONI CLAVE was a painter lost in occupied Frunce, fighting against the aesthetics of his Barcelona, 1 9 1 3 tryingdo connect with the free art that melancholy, we witness the growth process 1i"edon in the subsoil of the occupation. of one ofthe great creatss of this end- This artist has lived almost al1 his long His friendship with Picasso allowed him of-millennium, un exception against a and concentrated career in France, to connect directly with the inner logic backdrop of artists who calculate and where he settled in the forties. Antoni of the avant-garde, while in art exploit the time left to them for adminis- Clavé found in the Paris school his initial that broke with convention was prac- trating their calligraphy... chance to develop an art he has never tically clandestine and groups like Dau al stopped investigating with genuinely Set or El Paso were not to appear until Manuel Vázquez Montalbán