Painter who creates dialogue between lineal gesture and the writing of signs and lettering. Action and rhythm emerge from the simplicity of vertical and horizontal lines in search of the parallel path that the painting traces on the canvas. His pictograms are like large networks in which the viewer is aware of a certain unsettling order requiring their gaze so that the fundamental order of things may be distinguished. He has won numerous prestigious drawing and painting awards, including the 1987 Tarragona Biennial painting prize.
Originally from Olot, Josep Clarà moved after his training to live in Paris. There, his reference was Auguste Rodin and his sculptural work drew on symbolism to express human emotions through volume. Later on, influenced by Maillol, he developed his work to classic and Mediterranean styles linked to Noucentism. The Greco-Latin references, formal synthesis and purifying volumes led to an idealization of bodies and faces during the 1930s, the decade when he returned to Catalonia. Back in his homeland, Clarà undertook projects for public spaces and his career culminated with some monumental works based on the search for beauty.
A self-taught painter of portraits, bullfighting scenes and urban visions full of expressionism, energetic colours and dense textures that make up his first artworks up until the early eighties. Later, the colours are attenuated within compositions that explore the fast, calligraphic stroke and the pointillism or dripping. At the beginning of the nineties, his career took a turn towards the abstract current, with blurred images that allude to novelistic literature.
Painter who is representative of the constructivist current in Catalan art. Composition, rhythm, movement, formal structure and spatial organization are the reflexive constants of a meticulous work in which nothing is left to chance. Furthermore, the colours are laid out in essential layers of light and shade, subtle gradations of white, black and grey, that instil a unique sensation of space in the crystalline and abstract dimension of geometric proportions, creating the illusion of a third dimension. In 1976, he was awarded the first prize in the Joan Miró International Drawing Competition.
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