We find ourselves in an old textile factory from the late 18th century that was rehabilitated for use as a museum in 2009 by the Fundació Vila Casas. Currently this space of 5,000 m2 hosts the permanent painting collection, while in the Sala Espai A0, various temporary exhibitions are held.
Three more buildings comprise the exhibition structure of the Foundation: in Barcelona, the Espais Volart (in a former knitting warehouse run by the Volart family at the end of the 19th century); in the Empordà region, the Can Mario Museum of Contemporary Sculpture (in a former cork factory rehabilitated in Palafrugell) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in the Palau Solterra (a civil Gothic palace from the 15th century in the town of Torroella de Montgrí).
ESPAI A0
ENRIC ANSESA
— Persistences
A painting must contain the entire universe within it.
Enric Ansesa
Persistences is an exhibition that brings together the work of Enric Ansesa from the 1960s to the present, in an homage spanning the artist’s five-decade career.
Ansesa was born in 1945 in Girona, a city where he began his artistic practice and where he still lives. Whoever enters his studio will find references to Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), one of the artists who with Joan Miró (1893–1983) and Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) has had the most influence on his creative endeavour.
From Malevich, the creator of Suprematism, Ansesa has adopted a reductionist way of conceiving pictorial features: “I am all about minimums”, he recognises. Some thirty black paintings in small and medium format cover one of the walls of his studio. The Russian artist, in his first exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting (0.10), had also hung paintings of varied sizes on the gallery wall, works signifying the liberation of pictorial representation that would open the way to abstraction.
The influence of Joan Miró, who is also present in Ansesa’s creation, is expressed in the form of subtle touches of colour, as seen in some of his canvases. Lucio Fontana is made manifest in what Ansesa calls sutures, a visual response to the characteristic fissures of the precursor of Spatialism (that visual tendency that sought to capture movement, time and three-dimensionality).
The title of this exhibition, Persistences, focuses on the perseverance of the artist over the course of his career, the artistic constancy he has expressed himself with and his highly concrete thought processes in relation to theories of infinity and the cosmos.
Ansesa has worked with black for decades, attracted to the tone’s aesthetics as well as its perceptive possibilities. He has adopted this recourse as the ideal way to visually express his inner cosmos.
The surfaces of these canvases are the expression of various paintings, grounded in motifs that Ansesa has gone about adding over the years: initially, calligraphic signs, which in time have broadened to include crosses, lines, points and LEDs, as well as the previously mentioned sutures, amongst other features.
Enric Ansesa is fully dedicated to his creative practice, not only in painting but also in illustration, video, artist books and scenography. Quite beyond the aesthetic content of his work, he relies on art to position himself in terms of relevant social and political questions.
This Girona artist is in search of a contemporary visual and philosophical language that might encourage the viewer to transcend first impressions and interpret his works as universes where, as Ansesa himself has said, “everything happens”. This is why the critic Francesc Miralles came to define him as a “a conceptual man who paints”.