Matías Palau Ferré

MATÍAS PALAU FERRÉ (Montblanc, 1921-2000).
"Still life with watermelons".
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 92 x 73 cm; 102 x 82,5 cm (frame).

In this still life, Palau Ferré exhibits an exercise of geometric synthesis and chromatic exaltation, as spokesman of a post-cubist tradition filtered by a Mediterranean, warm and sensorial sensibility. The motif, the centerpiece housing slices of watermelon, becomes a pretext for a formal exploration of curve, rhythm and contrast. The red semicircles of the watermelon fragments are translated into a purely visual language that eliminates any anecdotal traces. Farré organizes them in a clear compositional structure, where each element - the bowl, the table, the fruit - is reduced to pure geometric forms, in harmonic tension with the black background, which accentuates the vivacity of the colors. Black here is not an absence, but a metaphysical and theatrical space, where the forms seem to float autonomously, as if the object had been abstracted from its context to rise to the plane of the symbolic. The result is a work that, like much of Ferré's art, transits with ease between the early avant-garde and the new figuration, and turns a classic genre into a manifesto of visual modernity.

Palau Ferré was trained in Barcelona, at the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi. He exhibited his work for the first time in 1951, at the Fine Arts Exhibition in Barcelona. From then on, he exhibited his work in Barcelona, Madrid and London, and also participated in the Salones de Otoño in Barcelona. In 1957 he receives a scholarship from the French government to further his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, where he lives until 1961. He exhibited in several Parisian galleries and, in 1971, he was invited to hold a solo exhibition at Syracuse University in New York. In the early seventies he experienced a personal and legal conflict regarding the commercialization of his art through art dealers, which culminated in a sentence that condemned him to pay a dealer with a certain number of square meters of his oil paintings. After complying with the ruling, and greatly outraged, he made the fatal decision to burn his works thereafter, immediately after they were created, as a demonstration of disagreement with what he saw as an attack on freedom of artistic expression and a brutally commercial manipulation of the artist's creative spirit. Between 1974 and 1989 he did not exhibit or show any of his work in public, and never painted oil paintings again. In the nineties he exhibited his work again, particularly Chinese inks, in numerous exhibitions in Spain and the United States, but never again in commercial art galleries. In 2001 a museum dedicated to his work was inaugurated in his hometown.