Guillem Nadal

GUILLEM NADAL (Sant Llorenç des Cardassar, Mallorca, 1957)
"Sense títol", 1987.
Mixed media on canvas.
Signed and titled on the back.
Measurements: 80 x 100 cm, 98 x 118 cm (frame).

This work by Guillem Nadal is inscribed in the material and gestural universe characteristic of the artist, where painting becomes a territory of traces, sediments and barely emerging signs. The composition, dominated by an earthy range of grays, ochers, blacks and whites, presents a dense and eroded surface, worked through accumulations, scratches, glazes and impastos.

On this background of strong mineral presence appear organic forms that suggest heads, eyes or zoomorphic presences, without fully materializing. Nadal thus constructs an ambiguous image, situated between material abstraction and figurative evocation, where the form seems to emerge from the pictorial matter itself as an archaeological vestige or a primitive apparition. The result is a painting with a telluric atmosphere, close to the memory of the earth, erosion and the ancestral.

Guillem Nadal began his exhibition career in his native Mallorca, at the Sa Pleta Freda Gallery in Son Servera, where he created the work presented here, in 1985. Since then he has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries in Barcelona, such as the well-known Dau al Set, the Centre Cultural de la Caixa in Valencia, the Palau Gravina in Alicante and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). He has also exhibited internationally, at the Joachim Becker Gallery in Cannes, France; at the Tobias Hirschmann Gallery in Frankfurt, Germany, at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Nice; the Michaela Möeller Gallery in Salzburg, Germany, and others.