The work of Agustí Centelles, a central figure in Spanish photojournalism, provides an indispensable testimony to the Spanish civil war; an episode that had a resounding effect on Spanish society and art that still resonates today. The framing, view points and depth of his photographs, taken with a Leica camera, freeze time while exuding modernity. Poetically charged works of epic force and dramatic intensity that, far from being merely anecdotal, present an unadorned reality displaying great discursive potential. Barred from practising photojournalism by Franco’s regime, he worked in publicity photography on his return from exile in 1944. He was awarded the National Photography prize two years before his death. Photos: Spain. Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. Historical Memory Documentation Centre. Agustí Centelles i Ossó archive.
Joana Cera is a multidisciplinary artist who combines sculpture, photography and drawing to create enigmatic spaces of disturbing tensions. Thoughts that find in photography the golden receptacle of their lights, in drawings the outline of their profiles and in sculpture the mutation of an identity that is built on itself yet simultaneously torn apart. Introspective voyages towards a world of dualities, journeys between the distance of opposites, the apology of circumspection and the erosion of the sense of time. Deconstructed works in order to project, in the same process of reconstruction, a multiplicity of meanings that enable interaction with the public.
Sensuality, voluptuousness, audacious condensation and poetic beauty are of the result of an exhaustive mental process far removed from everything that is intelligible. With a solid experience behind him and deep knowledge of technique with stone and metal, Lluís Cera’s sculptures are the receptacle of a struggle between tension-distension, robustness-flexibility, compactness-delicateness, roughness and smoothness. From figurative beginnings progressed to a ready-made abstraction, in which the sinuousness of light flows between winding forms that twist and curl impliable elements. Literary texts and pieces written in different languages that are embedded in the material – a harmonious combination of three-dimensionality and literature.
Jordi Cerdà is part of the generation of conceptual movement, of an essentially social and political nature, and he uses painting, objects, experimental cinema and photo performance to explore the relationship between reality and its representation. Through a careful process of fragmentation and deconstruction he encourages us towards a reflection on art and its inherent language. Rhetorical images, uncoupling, reproduction, authenticity and the projection of contrasts are components that condition the interpretation and, at the same time, extend the conceptual and chronological limits of artistic memory to contemporaneity. By means of a process of appropriation of images that coexist with each other and the confronted and disparate association, he endows the work of art with a new objective reading that connects thought and subconscious.
In Ramon Cerezo’s artwork emptiness is responsible for generating three-dimensional perspective. Geometric forms that, beneath an appearance of calculation and precision, express a world that reaches way beyond the intellect. Infinite lines and curves that intertwine and flow within the space and establish a dialogue between matter and perforation; open pieces that embrace the void and its eternity. In his recent abstract works, he uses new materials such as wood and an expressive incorporation of colour.
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.
Josep Ciquella’s paintings have been focused on elements from everyday life such as street furniture – street lamps, chairs and stairs – which are not short of detail: mouldings, patterned paper, cracks and ridges. He isolates the shades, enigmas between formal presence and absence, which acquire a life of their own and from which the viewer can project their imagination. Influenced by Antoni Tàpies and the informalist movement, as well as North American photorealism and Pop Art, he makes the invisible become visible to reveal the poetic sediment all those more modest and banal objects. Since the eighties he lived between Barcelona and New York, where he had his studio.
Ramón Clapers is a self-taught sculptor who mainly works with wood and, by using an admirable technique, achieves results with a high degree of originality and perfection. He understands art as a constant and aesthetic research in which he experiments with the plasticity of organic matter, and endows elasticity and ductility to pieces midway between figuration and abstraction. The desire to construct forms that contain and occupy the space is present in many of his works.
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