Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Mar groc [Yellow Sea]

Image caption
ALBERT RàFOLS-CASAMADA

Mar groc [Yellow Sea]

  • 1979
  • Oil on canvas
  • 50,2 x 102,2 cm
  • Cat. P_343
  • Acquired in 1987
By:
Beatriz Herráez

Mar groc (1979) is typical of Albert Ràfols- Casamada's work from the 1970s. At that time, he frequently resorted to a technique that he called 'silhouette in a window: something like an abstract element within reality, which does not extend outside the plane but also does not resort to perspective, creating an effect of depth and of a two-fold space which is both interior and exterior'. This technique had been part of his work for some time, and he returned to it and extended it in the 1970s, based on the formalisation of 'two-fold' spaces to generate an 'organic balance'. There are rectangles of colour that seem to be linked to the study of colour-fields in abstract expressionism, a movement with which he was very familiar.

In a diary entry dating from 1979 published in the book Forma, significado, sentido ['Form, Meaning, Sense'] by historian José Francisco Yvars, the artist has this to say: 'Simple forms, with no specific meaning, circulating across the surface of the painting, are like the insignificant events that fill so much of the real world... Colours extend over the canvas like the sand on a lonely beach. Colour speaks when material is silent'.

These words could certainly apply to this painting with its warm colours, organised around a horizontal yellow strip that crosses and dominates the space of the picture. With unusual subtlety and sensitivity, Mar groc takes shape via the superimposition of almost imperceptible glazes, pigments which are deposited on the canvas to create a fragile, evocative space; a visual surface that evokes the beaches of which the artist writes.

Albert Ràfols-Casamada's work is defined by Yvars as 'indicative painting': it sets out to let viewers access knowledge of sensitive matters via the light and the insignificant.

Beatriz Herráez

 
By:
Beatriz Herráez
Albert Ràfols-Casamada
Barcelona 1923 - Barcelona 2009

Albert Ràfols-Casamada is one of the best known exponents of the movement known in Spain as lyrical abstraction. He dropped out of an Architecture degree to join the Tárrega Academy in 1945. Years later he moved to Paris, where he stayed until 1954. There he met Eugenio d’Ors and Joaquín Torres García, whom he greatly admired. His career is closely linked to the lessons that he learned close to home, from his father the painter Albert Ràfols Cullerés, the Cercle de Maillol group and the French Institute of Barcelona.

After his time in Paris, he moved back to Barcelona in the 1950s and became one of the promoters of the Eina School, where he taught the theory of colour and served as headmaster for many years. This was a crucial period of his career, in which he moved from figurative to abstract art. In his own words, this 'happened as a result of my studies and work, particularly my reflections on art media, studios and landscape painting [...], which come down to four basic elements: colour, the painted surface, structure and rhythm'. Ràfols- Casamada's abstract works show a liking for collage and objects. The gradual consolidation of his style, which he honed more and more over the course of his career, resulted from the formulation of successive hypotheses concerning order, structure and colour.

He won the National Award for Plastic Arts in 1980 in recognition of his whole career. His work has been shown at the Vila Casas Foundation (Barcelona, 2016), the Esteban Vicente Museum (Segovia, 2016), the Fernández-Braso Gallery (Madrid, 2016), the Cervantes Institute in Paris (2016), the Perramo Foundation (Ventalló, Gerona, 2015), the Espai l’Abadia (Sant Joan de les Abadesses, Gerona, 2014) and the Am Park Gallery (Frankfurt, Germany, 2013). In 2001 the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona staged a retrospective of his work.

Beatriz Herráez

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.