SEVERAL ARTISTS - Travelling: Frank Horvat, Jordi Belver and Daniel Giralt-Miracle, Baldo Pié, and various artists

Ever since its beginnings, the Fundació Vila Casas has paid great attention to the promotion of the work of contemporary Catalan artists who, regardless of the discipline they use to express themselves or the artistic current of which they are a part, contribute to the heterodox and kaleidoscopic fabric of visual arts today.    

Within this context of the analysis and study of the artistic production of our immediate past and present, the Foundation set up a programme of travelling exhibitions, Itiner’ART, in order to promote exhibitions by contemporary Catalan artists and foreign artists with strong links to our country. Itiner’ART consists of solo or joint exhibitions by artists with work in the collection and a proven career, both nationally and internationally.  Here then is a small sample of four of these travelling exhibitions:

1. Frank Horvat, Homenatge a Catalunya (Homage to Catalonia)
   Homenatge a Catalunya was a commission from Antoni Vila Casas to the prestigious international photographer Frank Horvat (Abbazia, 1928). The project was to portray Catalonia in the first decade of the 21^st century. The plurality and openness of Barcelona, the passing of the centuries in Girona, the countryside around the river Ebro, the Pyrenean mountains, and the Cadaqués of Dalí together with landscapes, historic sites, cultural personalities and anonymous citizens all come together to form a kaleidoscopic patchwork of Catalan culture and life. The recollections and associations of ideas hidden for years in the storehouse of memory suddenly rise to the surface in the form of feeling and experience captured in the instant of a certain artistic gesture.  Divided into four sections – Traditions, Customs and Habits; Gestures, Looks and Smiles; Traces, Textures and Words; and Absences, Silences and Scents – the exhibition holds up for our inspection elements belonging to our everyday lives which the artist, via his precise and yet subtle gaze, transforms into a narrative.

2. Various artists. Un altre món (Another World)
   The exhibition Un altre món originated from a commission requesting several contemporary Catalan artists to express their particular concept of the world. It is a show comprising 46 small-format spherical sculptures which, taken together, offer a broad and unique view of the various artistic languages which exist today side by side. 
   The result is a grand pentagram of colours where the works, all starting with different artistic concepts and aesthetic viewpoints, create a melody of affinities and silences.  The dream-like view of some of the pieces lives along-side works which take a more critical, often ironic or sarcastic look at a world whose foundations appear completely unstable.  This is an instability trying to hold up the scaffolding – a wooden structure on which the pieces rest – which, metaphorically, references all the worlds under construction, the central theme of the exhibition.

3. Jordi Belver and Daniel Giralt-Miracle. Mirada i gest. 50 artistes. 1977-2007 (Gaze and Gesture. 50 Artists. 1977-2007)
   Mirada i gest. 50 artistes. 1977-2007 is a joint exhibition presented by the photographer Jordi Belver and the art critic Daniel Giralt-Miracle (Barcelona, 1944). With one using photography and the other the written word, they piece together the relationship between two viewpoints which find a space for inspiration in the world of creation. In a silence born of respect and admiration, like two explorers needing to traverse the territory that will lead them to certainty, both undertake the venture with the aim of capturing that which lies hidden beneath the mask of the face. As Giralt-Miracle puts it: “As a photographer, Jordi Belver has two obsessions; one is architecture and the other is artists. From the first he takes the articulation of space, its light, its shadows. What interests him about the second is the person, their thoughts, their surroundings, and going beyond the portrait to capture that which, more than what is visible, they have experienced.”

4. Baldo Pié. Des del balcó del meu silence (From the Vantage Point of My Silence)
   Baldo Pié (Barcelona, 1929–1999) came from a generation of artists headed by such well-known names as Carlos Mensa, Joaquim Llucià, and Amèlia Riera.  Despite being self-taught, his career spanned several periods which allowed him to immerse himself in the exploration of new creative processes.  He moved from his early phase, of matterist reliefs with techniques found in altarpieces, to a lyrical abstraction whose gestural force captured a sense of structure and form giving way to an exaltation of colour. 

After experimenting with polychromatic techniques, Pié became absorbed in the world of abstraction which, in the words of the art historian and critic Giralt-Miracle, “was the moment when, as well as finding a direction, he found his work.  It is in the large-scale works that, based on an almost Chillida-like structure, the fluid and gestural working of material alternated with a well-constructed rationalist geometricism, which is a fitting counterpoint to his fondness for all that which continues to be magmatic.”