Tag Archives: catalan artist

Hernández Pijuan

Barcelona, 1931-2005

 

 

Joan Hernández Pijuan started painting during the sixties with a style related to expressionism. Nevertheless, during the seventies the empty space started gaining prominence in his paintings such as the geometrical figures. As he mentioned himself, `the space´ became the objective of his work; `I’d say that a constant preoccupation is, and has been finding a space as total protagonist of the canvass. (…) A space as a living element and not as a surface upon which one draws or places himself.´

 

The landscape of his childhood in the town of Folquer have become a pictorial motive in his adult age: Hernández Pijuan resorts to a memory exercise to recreate it synthetically in his painting.

 

The objective of this painter was never to achieve a descriptive or narrative painting, but to emphasize through the monochrome the pictorial technique 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.

Barcelona, 1952

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

Frederic Amat’s artistic career dates all the way back to the early 1970’s. Just after completing his studies in architecture and set design, he went to live in Mexico and later he moved to New York, where he explored hand-made paper as an artistic material. His travels to Brazil, Egypt, Haiti, Morocco and so on has fecundated an oeuvre characterized by constant research. Throughout Amat’s career, he has been diversifying his plastic repertoire, his development going from irregular lines and vibrant colors in his early drawings to the expressionism in his later works.

 

The work of Amat defies a single way of categorization. His open conception of painting led him to integrate a multitude of languages into his artistic practice, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation art, performance, book illustration, videos, theatre set design and interventions in architectural spaces.

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.