Albert Ràfols Casamada

ALBERT RÀFOLS CASAMADA (Barcelona, 1923–2009). Untitled, 1991. Pastel, pencil, and charcoal on paper. Signed and dated in the lower left corner. Provenance: Private collection. Measurements: 42 x 52 cm. After a brief figurative period, the 1950s gave way to a more schematic and structured conception of reality, with a clearly abstract expressionist slant, which he would cultivate for the rest of his life. From the 1990s until the end of his career, his work is interpreted as a study of his own oeuvre. His stable and serene compositions display a structural purity taken to the extreme, in which symmetry, order, and balance shape the use of space—dominated by geometry and the complementarity of colors. A painter, educator, writer, and graphic artist, Ràfols Casamada enjoys great international prestige today. He began his journey in the world of drawing and painting alongside his father, Albert Ràfols Cullerés. In 1942, he began studying architecture, though he soon abandoned those studies to devote himself to the visual arts. His father’s Post-Impressionist influence and his own distinctive Cézannian style shaped the works presented at his first exhibition, held in 1946 at the Pictòria galleries in Barcelona, where he exhibited with the group Els Vuit. Later, he would develop a poetic abstraction—amorphous in form, free, and intelligent—the result of a slow creative process and drawing on environments, themes, objects, or graphic elements from everyday life. Ràfols Casamada works with these fragments of reality and life through a process of distortion, playing with connotations, artistic values, and the visual richness of their various possible interpretations, in an attempt to capture the fleeting nature of reality. In 1950, he received a scholarship to travel to France and settled in Paris until 1954. There he was introduced to post-Cubist figurative painting, as well as the work of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Miró, among others. These influences merged in his painting with those of American Abstract Expressionism, which was developing at that very moment. When he finally returned to Barcelona, he embarked on his own artistic path, with a style characterized by compositional elegance, based on orthogonal structures combined with an emotive and luminous color palette. After exploring an interesting relationship with Neo-Dada and New Realism in the 1960s and 1970s, his work has focused on purely pictorial values: fields of color in expressive harmony against which gestural charcoal lines stand out. He has received numerous awards, including the National Prize for the Visual Arts from the Ministry of Culture in 1980, the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1982, and the CEOE Arts Prize in 1991. In 1985, he was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters of France, and he is an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. In 2003, the Generalitat awarded him the National Prize for Visual Arts of Catalonia, and in 2009, just two months before his death, Grup 62 paid tribute to him at the National Art Museum of Catalonia. His work is held in major museums around the world: the Reina Sofía in Madrid; the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York; the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles; the Picasso Museum in France; the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris; and the British Museum and the Tate Gallery in London, among many others.