Tag Archives: barcelona

Carles Congost

Olot, 1970

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Carles Congost’s work revolves around the construction of personality and the behaviour codes and it is noted by the redevelopment of cinematographic, photographic and musical stereotypes. His work is developed in a harmonic way along with different disciplines –photographs, videos, sound and drawing- incorporating at the same time a classical and ironical treatment to the image.

 

The art world constitutes one of the themes that Congost has incorporated to his recent work, from the theatrical stagings that question the mechanisms, to the dynamics and stereotypes of the art world itself.

Alfons Borrell

Barcelona, 1931 – Sabadell, 2020

 

 

Alfons Borrell is one of the most prominent representatives of lyrical abstraction in Catalonia.

 

After attending the studio of Anglada Camarasa and the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Alfons Borrell began his artistic career in the fifties, within figuration at first. His work evolved into abstract expressionism and, already in the sixties, to the gestural painting.

 

In the mid-seventies he developed the style of its own, detached of any label, characterized by a sober chromatism that  is consciously disassociated from the material informality. In his painting, the color is imposed on the form, from a language that waives any reference, craving and seeking restraint and rigor.

Calella, Barcelona, 1963

Lives and works in Calella, Barcelona

 

Jordi Alcaraz’s work is a reflection on volume, artistic language and time through a lyrical handling of materials. An abstraction that is the result of the battle against limitations of format and conventions.

 

His work is based on the classical tradition of painting and sculpture and alters the meaning of the foundations of a real and recognizable object, to new genesis of meaning and continent.

 

Jordi Alcaraz transgresses surfaces and materials, gives unlikely uses to his pieces and redefines the logic of frames and methacrylate, of stones and plasters, of mirrors and woods, of shadows and metals; changing perceptions and conventional treatments.

 

He has done different bibliophile editions such as “El Viatge a Tokushima”, with text by Joaquim Sala-Sanahuja, or “Diorames”, together with Joan Brossa, Alfons Borrell, Perejaume and Jordi Rosés.

Bucharest, Romania, 1955

Lives and works in New York

 

 

Lydia Dona’s paintings hold many references to the city and the urban environment. So through tubes, screws and other objects that she superimposes to the colour stain, an enormous mechanism without human presence is revealed.

 

The surface of her paintings may recall the American abstract legacy of Pollock or Clyfford – Though the colours drift apart by their luminosity- that is juxtaposed to the mechanic images of the vanguards.

 

Lydia Dona maintains in her work the permanent conflict between urban abstractions with its noisy rhythm and the micro cosmos that makes it possible.

Barcelona 1954

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

 

 

Josep Riera i Aragó can be described as a visual poet, a sculptor who is equally at ease in the painting studio or in the printmakers workshop. Very early in his artistic development he established a deceivingly simple iconography to surprisingly universal and inescapable results. During the 1980s Riera i Aragó discovers his interest in the deep-sea environment, submarines, airplanes and machines operated by engines. This trace of the machine has since then been a clear thread through his oeuvre. Never repetitive, each “machine” he creates, regardless of the medium, evokes without pathos or condescension, a clear and sympathetic view of humanity. They machines are not only blurring the traditional frontiers between sculpture and painting, finally overlapping the two artforms, it also blurs the space between functional machines with a direct purpose and the life of the objects as art pieces. Riera i Aragó’s work highlights the machines, seen in its own dysfunction, in what is has been created for but never manage to do. His zeppelins, airplanes, ships and submarines must assume their inability to sail or fly. 

 

Besides from Riera i Aragó’s sculptures made in bronze and at times recovered iron, his oeuvre also holds great paintings and works on paper utilizing the same iconography as the sculptures; propellers, engines and machines. Especially his later painting seems to almost mimic or portray his sculptures, creating a close narrative between the two. Riera i Aragó’s pieces are essential to the understanding of some of the most characteristic emblems of our time, the world of machines and artifacts in general. His works speaks paradoxically about the machine, its transience, its capacity for suggestion, on a journey back and forth from real to imaginary space.

Erick Beltrán

Mexico City, 1974

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Erick Beltrán analyzes and reflects on the edition concept and the discourse constructions. He investigates the power that the different graphic means exert in their distribution of information, as well as explicit treatment on different conducts and values.

 

He works with diverse formats as the multiple or the book; he experiments and investigates the link between public art and the diverse graphic languages.

 

The archive, the museum and the library are tools and natural means in their investigation process. A process in which the edition concept focuses all the work, understanding it as the mechanism with which communication through images that create political, economical and cultural discourses in contemporary societies are defined, evaluated, classified and reproduced.

Antoni Muntadas

Barcelona, 1942

Lives and works between Barcelona, New York and Venice.

 

 

Antoni Muntadas’s work has developed from its beginning –early seventies– a constant criticism towards the languages and messages of the media as clear instruments of power.

 

Since the first moment he used the video as useful tool to dissect and make the mechanisms of communications visible, referring to television and the designated `media landscape´. This genuine study and treatment turned him into an early pioneer in the audiovisual artistic field.

 

Likewise, Muntadas has analyzed and questioned the relationships that are established between the public and the private through his video works, photographs and multimedia installations; it’s from the early nineties that he incorporates internet to this list.

 

Also, since the 90s, he initiates new kinds of long-term. In each of these projects a principal concept is developed, which extends through different stages and contexts.

Perejaume

Sant Pol de Mar, 1957

Lives and works in Sant Pol de Mar

 

 

Perejaume started to exhibit his work during the late seventies and since then he has been developing it in parallel, either in visual disciplines or in literary extension.

 

The landscape is a recurring subject analyzed and explored in his work, retaking and reevaluating the presence it has had most of all, in its literary and visual production. Through this approach, his relationship with the landscape is examined from diverse points of view none of which are exempt of irony. Points of view that are shaped through painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video or the intervention on the natural environment itself.

 

For Perejaume, man is part of the landscape, he isn’t an outsider to it and he is yet another agent in its conformation and evolution, as if the geologic time would have been accelerated.

Javier Peñafiel

Zaragoza, 1964

Lives and works in Mallorca

 

 

Javier Peñafiel’s work, drawings, videos, texts and sculptures make up a linguistic system parallel to a reality to which he is unconnected.

 

All through his career, Javier Peñafiel has built up a universe inhabited by characters; by sentences that work autonomously, such as phrases that have the duty to bother the quiet and routine based use of the language by the spectator; or videos where diverse elements are combined in the shape of tableaux, sharing a space but keeping at the same time their identity separate.

 

The works of Javier Peñafiel show the necessity and the difficulty in direct communication. His works investigate the double identity – as obstacle and as a bridge- that the language represents in such communication.

Fernando Prats

Santiago de Chile, 1967

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

In his work Fernando Prats “paints” or, we’d rather say, recreates nature; he deals with registering tracks, making the invisible visible, giving voice and image to what was present but kept unnoticed.

 

Using seismographs, traces, photographs, videos… he registers the beat of different realities on smoked supports, from the flight of birds to the wild jet of a geyser, the deep coal of mines or the powerful waves that break against the cliff. Thus, Fernando Prats holds an unorthodox relationship with painting, both for the choice of his instruments and for the intervention of chance.

 

His work is formalized in actions which himself registers, that show the creative processes intrinsic to his work. Fernando Prats paintings are time-objects, as they condense in their finished form a story, the one of its creation, whose times often have nothing to do with the ones of the artist, but with the natural rhythms.

Ràfols Casamada

Barcelona, 1923-2009

 

 

Besides his long pictorial career which has boosted him internationally, Albert Ràfols Casamada has another creative side as a literary poet. It is of no surprise that his multidisciplinary character attracts him to teaching and pedagogy in the world of fine Art.

 

In his painting, modernity’s fragile equilibrium has been developed and maintained: his work, of classical origin, incorporates at the same time the legacy of the avant-gardes.

 

During the early seventies he abandoned figuration to work in the field of abstract painting that would take him, during the eighties and nineties, to develop a more lyrical abstraction. This process would lead to what is his most recognized stage in his artistic career.

 

On the other hand, Ràfols Casamada has had a fundamental role in the renewal of the arts teaching in Spain being the founding member of the Eina School in Barcelona in 1967.

Soñé que revelabas (Madeira), 2019

Santander, 1954

Lives and works in New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Juan Uslé´s painting is based on his urban experience, particularly New York, where he moved in the late eighties. Visual perception, liquid – so mobile and fluid – and light structures and spaces, greatly influenced him, bringing forth a combination of geometric elements and organic elements in his compositions.

 

Juan Uslé works mixing his own colors and applying them by dispersion on canvas, building abstract images from geometric patterns, light and color. In each of his compositions he combines the search of an organization and structure, along with the appearance of the unexpected.

 

The painting of Juan Uslé analyzes, rather than expresses, the origin of his own images based on the urban experience. His practice is based on the interplay between formal antitheses, and so his work is defined as opposing dynamics.