Source: Bourg-Madame Town Hall

The new space of contemporary art of the French Cerdagne will accommodate the work of this Catalan painter.

The ancient Tourism Office in the village of La Guingueta D'ix (Bourg-Madame), in the French Cerdagne, will become the headquarters of Josep Puigmarti's works. The result will be a space of contemporary art, with the name of the same painter, which will accommodate a hundred of works. This initiative wants to contribute to the cultural development of the region and to increase, thus, the commercial potential with the increase of the number of visitors.

Complementing the exhibition, a projector of video will spread all the works of the career of the artist in continuity. The center will be a unique place in the Cerdagne and will constitute, undoubtedly, a new form of cultural enrichment.

THE SURREALISM

With nuances, it is the vertebral column that connects all the work of the painter and Catalan sculptor Josep Puigmarti. The space of contemporary art of the Cerdagne will accommodate especially works of Alien Fashion, his last collection. These are characterized paintings showing figures drawn with few outlines, independently of the size of the work. They are suggestive paintings in which the composition of the painter is specified in some gestures that strike by the security of the outline. In many cases, an only outline determines the composition and the brushstrokes that specify concrete zones of the image are few.

This way to compose the canvas in white eliminates the third dimension. This is another of the features that describe the personality of the works of Puigmartí. Good part of the history of the occidental painting has focused on the search of the depth, of the vision of the real space. This was the big milestone since the last times of the Gothic painting until the great periods of the rococo.

Puigmarti positioned on the fringe of this obsession. It is certain that in determinate works of the seventies of the artist a certain depth was reflected in the paintings, but never from the Renaissance or baroque perspective. The depth of Puigmartí is created thanks to a juxtaposition of plans and of objects that, with a fleeting visualization, provokes the sensation of a certain depth that does not coincide with the canonical sense of the concept.

THE AUTOMATISM

This is another characteristic of the paintings of Josep Puigmartí but it is a feature that he has kept on developing progressively along his professional trajectory. When he was a kid he spent hours contemplating how the spiders wove their tenuous and perfect web. In a similar way, and during his initial stage, Puigmartí carried out compact compositions, the lines of which were interwoven continuously and they achieved, however, a rhythm and an equilibrium surprising. Later, the artist however gave a step more and stood in the deepest of the automatism, in the “let it make”. This is the point where Puigmartí achieved that freedom that leaves the spirit work alone and that constitutes one of the basic foundations of the surrealism. "An automatism purely dictated by the spirit, without any kind of control of the reason and alien to aesthetic and moral appraisals," commented of Puigmartí the French writer André Breton, known like the main instigator of the surrealist movement.

PREDILECTION FOR THE BODY OF THE WOMAN

The protagonism of the woman in the compositions of Puigmartí is one of the internal links of good part of his work. The artist does not use the figure of the woman like a sexual icon, but like a group of crossed and contradictory feelings that oscillate from the eagerness of conquers of the feminine body until the concretion of impossible dreams. Puigmartí joins to the figure of the woman and, in its formation, tears it to pieces, deforms it and destroys it. He also joins her to flowers, snails and penis, among other objects, in an explosive composition that escapes any interpretative orthodoxy.

That Bohemia life that took the artist during the sixties, especially to Sweden, allowed him to develop a challenging vision and an extense knowledge of the feminine world: he is the creator of the antiheroic body of the woman. Josep Puigmartí does not have a philosophy preconceived in the elaboration and in the choice of subjects, but has one long and deep record of knowledge, especially of the woman, that allows him to create works of art of a supreme quality. Puigmartí does not speak about sex, but about passions, and makes it with an attitude expert of the feelings, avoiding any invasion in the world of the superficiality.

A LITTLE HISTORY ABOUT THE ARTIST

Josep Puigmartí was born in Monistrol de Calders, a village of the Bages. From very young he was promising as a painter and with 11 years he participated in a collective exhibition in his village.

In the fifties he settled in Barcelona, where he discovered the surrealism and the abstract and where he gets free from the classical ways to undertake a personal way from the technical and thematic point of view.

His first important exhibition took place in Barcelona in 1956.

In the sixties he moved to Sweden, where he met painters as important as Salvador Dalí or Albert Ràfols Casamada.

Josep Puigmartí is part of the genre of painters that, familiarized with the techniques of the painting, they achieve to create an imaginative work using changing and innovative forms that evolve into the rhythm of the society.

The exhibition will be able to be visited from Tuesday to Friday from 9.00 until 12.00 hours and from 14.00 until 18.00 hours. Saturdays, from 14.00 to 18.00 hours. For 3 euros the adults will be able to enjoy this piece of Catalan cultural history, placed in the French Cerdagne, through the works of Josep Puigmartí. Children under 12 years have free entry.

Magazine PANXING PIRINEUS
Source: Town council of Bourg-Madame
Photos: Extracted from "L’Histoire des yeux" by Vicenç Llorca and "Puigmartí" 2005-2006