Joan Riera Ferrari

JOAN RIERA FERRARI (Manacor, Mallorca, 1943).
Untitled.
Mixed media on wood.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 50 x 22 cm.

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, though he never lost sight of the importance of the painterly 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).