Francisco Javier Sebastià Mares

FRANCISCO JAVIER SEBASTIÀ MARES (Burjassot, Valencia, 1934–1993).
"In the Countryside," 1959.
Mixed media on panel.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 209 x 122 cm, 220 x 133 cm (frame).

Francisco Javier Sebastià Mares was a Spanish painter trained at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia, where he began his academic career before broadening his experience in Paris between 1962 and 1965. This period of exposure to the European avant-garde had a decisive influence on his artistic development, steering his work toward a constant transformation between figuration and abstraction.

His body of work is characterized by a continuous search for a personal artistic language, traversing different stylistic phases in which he explores Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and various forms of symbolic abstraction. Throughout his career, he developed a special interest in structure, color, and the distortion of reality, constructing a visual universe in which the figurative gradually dissolves into compositions of a geometric and symbolic nature.

In the final years of his career, particularly between 1982 and 1990, his work reached a mature synthesis dominated by symbolic and constructive abstraction, consolidating a unique artistic language based on the repetition of signs, visual rhythms, and formal structures that point to a more introspective and conceptual dimension.

In addition to his work as an artist, he taught at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia, which reinforces his connection to the academic world and the training of new generations of artists. His work has been recognized for its capacity for constant evolution and for the internal coherence of his creative process, understood as an ongoing exploration of form, perception, and the meaning of the pictorial image.