Portraits
Girl
looking out the window
2003
116 x 89 cm
acrylic on canvas
This image was
originally of a girl, Glòria, sitting on the ground in the
Plaça Major in Tàrrega, which was full of people, many
young, during the Theatre Fair. While waiting for the show,
which I think was Pau Riba, quite naturally and without
imagining that she was being observed, she fixed her head
scarf, gathering up her hair. From the first moment what
captivated me was the elegance of the gesture, with
self-confidence and the anonymous expression arising from a
mysterious internal beauty. I decided that the posture and
the gesture could be in private, looking at the light of
the new day through the window. Later I found out that this
was a very recurrent image. Apart from the well-known
reference to Dali’s painting, there are various scenes of a
girl fixing her hair in front of a mirror. This composition
has been repeated throughout the history of painting and we
can find various examples, especially in a number of
paintings by Jack Vettriano that show a girl looking at
herself in the mirror and fixing her hair.
What has
centered my attention in this work is the white blouse-
certainly a thin delicate cotton that lets a little of the
skin color to show through. We can see that subtly in the
fact that this white of the blouse has a marvelous specter
of hues: the pink of the skin, blue and purple in the
shadow, ochre from the light reflecting off the elements
that surround it... And, yes, finally a little white spot
where the sun touches it directly. The mystery of the light
and the mystery of the gesture come together at any moment
in life for those who know how to look and discover
them.
Maria
2004
89 x 116 cm
acrylic on canvas
In summer, Maria
likes to sit next to the inner patio. In front of her old
sewing machine and patch a piece of clothing or alter a
dress that doesn’t fit properly. It is a part of the house
that is a little cooler and there is a nice light that
shines in indirectly, reflecting off the walls of the
patio. The room is lit peaceably and warmly. The light
reflects everywhere and the colors of everything around it
mix and fill the scene. These old houses have very nice
floor tiles with geometric or floral patterns that shine
when the sun touches them and whose designs change color
depending on where you look. The study of this scene is
enormously rich and complex. Only concentrating attention
on the infinite subtleties of the clothing and its folds
allow us to delve into an abstract composition. You could
spend all life looking at a scene like this and discover
the infinite richness in the colors of the simplest
things.
Self
portrait
2006
54 x 73 cm
acrylic on canvas
This is a more
experimental recent work, consciously searching for the
separation of color and light, between the tone and the
luminosity. The experiment consists of dividing the image
into ten values of grey, plus black and white. You have to
look for ten colors that have this same intensity of light,
independently of their color, or rather. The next step is
to seek the maximum chromatic diversity but with an exact
luminosity on the scale from zero (black) to one hundred
(white). Once you have the palette with these colors, use
it to paint, as if it were a monochromatic drawing, only
taking into account the values of the grey and not worrying
about, but rather looking for, the maximum arbitrariness in
the hues of color. The result, seen on a black and white
screen or transforming the image to a scale of grey on a
computer, should show a “correct” luminous correlation,
with values adjusted to the original model.
In this case,
I deliberately chose to work on a self-portrait because of
its metamorphic significance: the paradox and contradiction
between the light that represents and the color that is
invented, a game between representation and invention that
is personified in the image I see of myself and the one I
don’t. The mysterious game between the visible light and
the invisible colors.