The exhibition Guillem Viladot, l’experimentació incessant (Guillem Viladot, Unceasing experimentation), curated by Pau Minguet, aims to recognize the career of an unclassifiable artist who, through experimentation and mixing genres and languages, produced a quite unique set of work. For this reason, in the year of the centenary of his birth, the Centre d’Estudis Catalans of París joins the celebration of the Year of Viladot with this exhibition.
Born into a family of pharmacists in Agramunt, Guillem Viladot (1922–1999) combined the profession of apothecary with frenetic activity in the fields of letters and the visual arts. A poet, novelist and journalist, he entered the Catalan cultural scene in the 1950s, creating strong ties with the main figures of the day. Thus, it was with the help of Josep Iglésias del Marquet that he created “Lo Pardal”, a collection of books of experimental poetry, in the late 1960s. In 1980, he exhibited in the Galeria Maeght in Barcelona his series “Iconografies de l’ús i de l’oci” (Iconographies of Use and Leisure), a project which over time has become seen as one of Viladot’s most important contributions to the world of Catalan visual art.
He opened a museum in Agramunt with all the pieces he had made, fruit of found objects and assemblage. Viladot provides us with material to circumvent all the romantic or even condescending preconceptions we may have of rural life. To promote the figure of Viladot is to promote the idea that, although being geographically marginalised in an agricultural town in the Urgell region, it is possible to be at the forefront of radical artistic explorations. He made them his own and transformed them without ever losing touch with his roots.
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