GUILLEN NADAL – Recent works

January – March 2022

The Alvaro Alcazar Gallery presents from January 21 the monographic exhibition of the Majorcan artist Guillem Nadal. The exhibition includes a total of sixteen pieces made in recent months, in large and small format, for which the painter has used paper, board and canvas as supports. Guillem Nadal retakes for this exhibition his “Projecte per a una illa”, a series started in 2016 and which is, without a doubt, one of the valued projects within his extensive career. The works exhibited here, like all the project, stand out for their great gesturality, conferred by the artist’s creative process. Nadal works with his hands, plowing the canvas, producing furrows, textures; literally introducing himself into the work. The result is a game of light and shadow that invites not only to see the paintings from different points of view, but also generates in the spectator an inevitable attraction to touch the paintings. Nadal’s characteristic monochromatism, limited to a palette of whites, blacks, and grays, is altered on this occasion by the novel introduction of purple tones, which for the artist are nothing more than part of the process of “sedimentation”, as he defines it, the result of chance in the process of creating the painting. Guillem Nadal’s artistic production includes different series, where the artist projects fragments of himself, different attitudes, or feelings; this is the case of “Miralls” or “El Paisatge de la memòria”, thus constituting his “Projecte per a una illa” a small part of this extensive production.

The works presented here show the artistic maturity of their author, understanding them within the totality of the project and not in solitary. From a formal point of view, Nadal moves in the language of abstraction, creating curved forms, under which underlies the idea of the island. Island as a sentimental journey, as a metaphor for life, as a path that takes you back to the starting point and finally, to the possibility of building your own island. Paradoxically, an island that does not refer to the place where Nadal was born and lives but has much deeper meanings. This is his particular way of joining and reinventing the long tradition of Majorcan landscape painting, which reached its highest peaks in the 40s, the difference is that Nadal, recreates the landscapes of the mind, referring to the poetics of this genre.  

 

List of pieces

Catalogue of works