Radical and transgressor. Ferran Garcia Sevilla at the Tecla Sala Art Center

The Tecla Sala Art Center and the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC) presented this Monday the retrospective exhibition Cosmos-Chaos by the artist Ferran Garcia Sevilla (City of Mallorca, 1949) which can be seen from 'this Wednesday until May 28, 2023. The exhibition offers the entire career of the artist, especially the painting, reaching up to his most recent production. It presents works from very different periods, such as the conceptual period or the wild painting of the first years, with "radical" works with a "transgressive" power. On the other hand, the artist has given the MNAC 54 works from the years 1966 and 1974, made during the end of the Franco regime. Concept period pieces will be displayed in Wings 81 BIS and 52.

The exhibition at the Art Center Tecla Sala de l'Hospitalet de Llobregat presents Garcia Sevilla's key concerns: the denunciation of systems of power and oppression, violence, the dynamics of art, the fascination with the cosmic mystery - inspired for the contributions of modern physics - and, always in the background, the constant questioning of artistic language.

Works from different periods and languages are combined with a sequence that allows us to introduce existential and moral problems of the present day such as the concern for the political present and its conflicts.

On the tour of the exhibition, you can see Garcia Sevilla's last paintings coexisting with early works, works with tiles made in this same factory site of Tecla Sala, when the artist had a workshop there in 1988. Also photographs that record performative acts in the impossible capture of the world. These are works that reflect on violence and that manifest the revolt against the sordidness of authoritarianism and the Franco legacy. "Paintings that seem abstract, but they are not. Traces and traces of the body, of her blood", they explained.

The retrospective offers the records of a "desperate" and "uncompromising" effort to approximate meaning to an answer that may not exist and cannot be put into words.

As they explained, the exhibition was conceived from the point of view of contrast so as not to betray the energy and evolutionary logic of Ferran Garcia Sevilla's work. Thus there are works with different forms and means but consistent with the spirit and objectives.

They have also remembered that since the end of the sixties of the last century, Ferran Garcia Sevilla was one of the outstanding pioneers of conceptual art, with very diverse and radical proposals, using the object, poor materials and photography, often as to performative register. Later, at the beginning of the eighties, he immersed himself fully in painting, coinciding with the neo-expressionist fashion. The push that prompts the artist to paint differs from the time because it seeks to call out the carnality of existence or the scandal of war, to destroy the myth or deception of the sacralized truth.

"Chaos, evil, stupidity and violence disgust him and mobilize him. The order of men is often a disorder, a sick growth, against which revolt is essential", they emphasized.

In statements to the media, the artist Ferran Garcia Sevilla has explained that both the works he has donated to the MNAC and those that can be seen in the Tecla Sala are a set of works that raise "different ideas" of political aspects, of nature and other issues. He indicated that some of the pieces have been hidden until now and others that were strongly rejected.

Garcia Sevilla has acknowledged that throughout his artistic career he has been "independent" and has worked outside the mainstream. "I have always had a confrontation with political or artistic power", he commented. The artist was happy to see the works on display and some that are part of the National Collection.

The donation, Tensions and riots

The set that enters the MNAC, which is on display until May 28, is a denunciation of the end of Francoism with "virulence and subtlety". Apart from the 54 works, a series of works related to the Mallorcan landscape are included that are presented at the National Museum in dialogue with the painting of Joaquim Mir.

A series of 45 photographs intervened in 1974 from images cut from the press and associated with violence, death, torture and war has also been deposited. The MNAC has noted that the donation is of "great historical importance" for the history of contemporary Catalan art. "It represents a fundamental contribution to the constitution of the national collection of post-war and second avant-garde art", they emphasized from the MNAC.

In the works that have been given you can see the artist's constant preoccupation with the contemplation of nature and the questioning of the physical laws of the cosmos. It is a rather unknown work that allows problems such as advances in quantum physics, the definition of art and its place in society, the psycho-sociology of the image or the denunciation of abuses of power and authority

An important number of the works that will form part of the National Collection bear witness to the political and social situation at the end of Francoism, with a denunciation of the symbols and power structures of Franco's National Catholicism.