Biographies (2001) is from Ignasi Aballí’s early mature work, when he turned his back on a literal approach to painting and threw himself into exploring the medium itself, its devices and components, in order to produce works closer to conceptual art strategies. Aballí addresses the history of painting from the very names of its lineage and, at the same time, gives those names to colours and even provides them with a cultural identify, from Rembrandt to Goya and from Brueghel to Veronese.  Colour is literally and directly present, as the basic element that shapes the art of painting, at the same level as the written word, but neither actually sets a written or painted scene. The narrative apparently promised by the title does not appear and any possible rhetoric is thus quashed.The absence of content is emphasised by a linguistic game between signifier (the words in vinyl and the identification number) and signified (the background colour to which those words refer), in what is seemingly a cold, industrial inventory or a display of samples in the premises of a purveyor of fine-arts materials.Thus, paint achieves its “level zero”, its maximum degree of distance and neutrality.

During an interview with the artist, João Fernandes refers to this type of practice in Aballí’s work as deconstruction of the cultural weight of the colour range: ‘At the same time, you can also work with the colours from a dye catalogue to the point of deconstructing the cultural legibility of a colour. It is impossible to speak of one of your colours as if we were referring to a colour painter’s piece, because your work is already in itself a deconstruction of the cultural pretensions of a colour. [...] We are faced with a re-objectification of everything that the cultural structure deconstructs of what those things can mean’.

In its use of written text as scientific, remote comments on colour fields, which are analytical and stripped of all romanticism, Biographies can be likened to later works such as CMYK Sky (2011), Coloured Cards (2010) and other more recent ones related to typeface design, such as Signs (2017), with warnings by the museum that the work of art in question is not present in the same way as master painters are absent from their works.

Carlos Martín