Virgilio Vallmajó

VIRGILIO VALLMAJÓ (Olot, Girona, 1914 - Toulouse, France, 1947).
Abstract composition.
Oil on canvas glued on board.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 73'5 x 91'5 cm; 95 x 113'5 cm (frame).
Of self-taught formation, Vallmajó was born in Olot, where he must have known its famous school of landscape, of naturalistic spirit, and soon he moved to Barcelona, where he frequented the avant-gardists and the cubists, impregnated in some case of the old spirit of "Els Quatre Gats". Not much is known about those early years, except for his passionate and authentic passion for painting. At the beginning, in a tone of faded colors, he found himself in the orbit of cubism and post-cubism, closer to Juan Gris and his vertiginous still lifes than to Picasso. The Civil War surprised him in Madrid; he worked in propaganda for the Republican cause and soon joined the Federation of Iberian Anarchists. He joined the Aragon front, fighting in Belchite in 1937. In February 1939 he took the road to exile in France, and visited the prison camps of Argelés-sur-Mer. He managed to reach Paris, and there he came into contact with key figures in his career: other painters in exile, the writer Jaime Sabartés and, above all, Picasso. They exchanged portraits, and Picasso helped him to deepen his painting and must have suggested some paths for his evolution. In Paris he began the formal search for an analytical cubism that would soon be transformed into an analysis of geometric abstraction. He never ceased to be a sober artist, unfriendly to artifice, aspiring to essentiality. He had drunk from the avant-garde currents, and had also known and assimilated the work of artists such as Malevich, Kandinsky or Mondrian. All of them, in some way, are present in the most intense chromatic painting of his second period, more powerful in intention and vigor, with sharp lines, sometimes sharp, symmetrical, harmonious and clean. During these years he made his neo-cubist work known for the first time in the "Exhibition of Painters of Free Spain", at the Castelucho Gallery in Paris. However, he was a sick creator, lacking in resources, who traveled from city to city. The outbreak of the Second World War led him to leave the capital. He toured Colliure and Vermeille and settled in Toulouse, where he managed to exhibit his two series "Still Lifes" and "Landscapes of the Mediterranean", but finally died at the age of thirty-three, plagued by tuberculosis. He left, inside a barn, about a hundred works on almost all supports: blankets and sheets, oils, papers, boards and cardboards. This production was the writing of an artist, the strokes, symbols and objects of a creator who died too soon.