Joan Riera Ferrari

JOAN RIERA FERRARI (Manacor, Mallorca, 1943).
“Nubios,” 2006.
Watercolor on paper.
Signed and dated.
Measurements: 103 x 72 cm; 122 x 91 cm (frame).

The “Nubios” series marks a significant turning point in Joan Riera Ferrari’s career. Fascinated by the stoic nature of this African people, the artist developed a series in which light takes center stage, becoming the essential element for portraying scenes of everyday life. Through an intense interplay of hallmarks of light and shadow, Riera Ferrari creates compositions of great expressive power. The figures, conceived with an almost sculptural boldness, appear to be carved from stone, yet they remain immersed in movement and brimming with life. This tension between the apparent stillness of form and the energy of gesture lends the series an extraordinary visual intensity. The “Nubians” evoke both the harshness of African light and the resilience with which this people coexists with it. The duality that runs through much of Riera Ferrari’s work—between Eros and Thanatos, life and death, water and rock—finds a new expression here.

Joan Riera Ferrari began painting in the 1980s, after discovering the visual power of rocky landscapes during a trip to Switzerland. In the 1990s, Riera Ferrari returned to figurative art, without ever forgetting, however, the importance of the pictorial medium itself. He held his first retrospective at Espacio Mallorca in Barcelona between December 2006 and January 2007. Riera Ferrari’s painting finds its light through an earthy color palette, inspired by the sea and the Mallorcan landscape. In this way, the artist redirects material abstraction toward imaginary spaces where the sea and rugged rock take center stage. He transforms these landscapes into places of the soul—mysterious, evocative, unsettling, and magical—dark and luminous depending on the moment and the hour, but above all, always radiant. His painting takes the seascape as its main theme, yet it goes beyond a mere repetition of the Mallorcan coastline or painting with purely decorative intent. Riera Ferrari presents a body of work in which the landscape is rendered with a pictorial treatment full of inner restlessness and dissatisfaction, as well as a vigorous and expansive force. Riera Ferrari is currently represented at the Porreres Museum and Art Collection (Mallorca).