JORDI FULLA
— Llindar i celístia
We are too small to comprehend the universe from the outside.
Jordi Fulla.
Llindar i celístia, or that space where dry stone huts abandon their earthy materiality as they are fused into the mystic unknown.
Through the work and thought of Jordi Fulla (Igualada, 1967), these dry-stone huts take on another facet. With his artistic practice, these ancestral constructions, found over a good part of Catalan and Mediterranean geography, take on forms that go quite beyond their practical functionality. For most people they are useless ruins that have lost their identity. They are the orphans in a landscape that in the past once enjoyed a better life, although every so often a spiritual gaze might rescue them from anonymity.
Fulla has one such gaze. He observes them with detainment, seeking responses. He most likely draws near to them out of admiration, to caress the dry stones that uphold them, while a variety of lyrical thoughts burst from his mind and fly about overhead, the huts below. We might imagine that in that moment of ecstasy, the creative necessity is born, leading the artist to erect them visually as temples for refuge. “I like this point where it is not clear if the painting is the landscape or the landscape is the painting. And this idea of doing the painting as you were building a cabin—for me that’s an extraordinary fount of knowledge.”
When Jordi Fulla was still a student, he came to landscape by chance, after a commission involving identifying popular names for the natural and architectural rural environment of Catalonia. Something so unexpected and original would allow him to weave together thoughts and feelings that further on would end up settling in his artistic memory. Only later would he choose to revive those experiences to create a personal artistic project: a mystical journey taking on the shape of artworks; or expressed in a different way, visual creations that become a sublime experience.
Llindar i celístia, the exhibition we present here, brings together a great number of works created by the artist over many years working on the subject of dry-stone huts. So far, he has done a total of five exhibitions on this subject in various locations in Catalonia and Andorra—with the Fundació Vila Casas. In this exhibition he brings together the work of all five previous shows, where the huts emerge as a metaphor for a passage from the earthly domain to the realm of the imperceptible, with painting the artist’s most trusty ally in the search for the memory of origins and nature.
Fulla speaks to us from an almost imperceptible threshold. From a mysterious space that is hard to define, though which some thinkers call “nothingness”. A point without coordinates where mystical experience takes on a pleasureful dimension. Perhaps for Fulla this is closer to the stars than to the earth, and perhaps for this reason he relates the threshold with starlight, that celestial glow.
The way we perceive the forms (including the void) we see depicted depends on our gaze. Miró, an artist greatly admired by Fulla, expressed it this way: “The key point, for me, is the form.” On the side of transmission, between matter, the threshold and ourselves. The artist transforms the void into form and vice versa, inviting us to participate in his extra-sensorial experience.
“It is my task to inhabit this nothingness, this slice of a space between what is tangible (in appearance) and what is unintelligible, which is nothing other than a metaphor for the act of painting.” Jordi Fulla