"La Galeria" by Josep M. Cadena (Art Critic)
Exit Magazine, No. 44| El Periodico
THE ART CRITIC JOSEP M. CADENA, VISITS THE CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER PUIGMARTI
IN BOURG-MADAME, FRANCE
Surprising space with Catalan Art in the French Cerdagne
Few artists are as surprisingly creative as Puigmarti not only installed in his dreams but always arranged to capture them for the others. He painted beautiful girls with four or six pairs of bosoms, as well as with vibrant buttocks, but also now he gives body to the demons that live in the hell of his mind.
Born in Monistrol de Calders in 1932, already at the age of 12 Puigmarti exhibited in Castellterçol; in 1956 he did it in Montserrat Isern’s gallery Syra, bastion of the Catalan art that was convenient to support and also to make advance, presented by Sebastià Gasch, and in 1960 he repeated with a text by Juan Eduardo Cirlot for the catalogue; he lived in the royal Sweden, different from what the Swedes of the Costa Brava were suggesting, in France and in the United States; he belonged to the circle of the North Americans who were admiring Salvador Dali; he drew and painted for important publications of New York and enjoyed many pleasures that give life, simultaneously that remove it.
In 1989 he returned to Catalonia, settled in Sitges and two years later he felt free and wrapped up in the Hotel Estela in Aiguadolç – the hotel of the rooms painted by Xaus, Subirachs, Moscardó, Grau Garriga, he himself and others – where he has consolidated his wide imaginative capacity in the plastic subject.
Now Puigmartí has, also, a permanent space in the centre of Bourg-Madame, next to the town hall that was La Guingueta d’Ix, officially re-baptized in 1815, to the fall of Napoleón, in honour of Maria Teresa Carlota, duchess of Angoulême and daughter of Luís XVI. In what, at first, was a tourism office, a space has been enabled with pictures and the sculptures by Puigmarti, with his surprising “aliens” and musical instruments that, bereft of their own sound, now have esthetical presence. And outdoors, with the recycling of big tubes of plastic, he has mounted a monument ("Quatre"), which exhibits on top of it the colours of the French flag. A creative Catalan in the French Cerdagne.
