Since that first exhibition by Naxo Farreras (Barcelona, 1951) in 1976, at Lanfranco Bombelli’s legendary Galeria Cadaqués, up until the anthology at Museu Can Mario in Palafrugell in 2021, we have seen one of the most personal, refined yet little-known Catalan careers in sculpture in the last half-century. Though his artwork began in jewellery he soon turned his back on the established norms in classical rhetoric to release his own ‘vitality’ and extract the demon from the material with which he works. His work is presented to us naked – on the surface of stone, wood, marble, agate, alabaster or expanded polystyrene – smoothed down, polished and sharpened to the point of exhaustion.
It is unnamed, allergic to the word, keen on the outdoor elements. An entirely autarchic work.
This is how Naxo Farreras found, from early on, the expressive force of the form itself and each work is presented to us as the corollary of a combination of formal tensions through the compositional rhythms, the density of the masses, the concavities and convexities of the different planes, the texture of each material and the colour of the surfaces. Basically, the hidden impulses in the matter: its secret life, that can only be untwined by the most dextrous hands. So, his sculptures emerge as much from a dialogue with the organic and geological world as from an intense process of introspection. Sculpture as a path to oneself. Hence the double motivation with which each and every one of these works of art has to struggle and strive to balance: from the inside out, but even more so from the outside in.
Centre d’Estudis Catalans de París
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