Pep Camps. Time and paint

Next December 21 Pep Camps opens in Girona. Time and paint , a full tribute from the city of Girona to this artist. The exhibition, divided into four spaces, aims to highlight the career of this painter based on a review and reflection of his works during these almost forty years of complete dedication to the world of plastic arts.

House of Culture of Girona

The House of Culture will be in charge of opening this series of recognitions with an exhibition where we wanted to focus on his figure and his historical moment. His day-to-day life in Parlavà, his stays in Asia, his literary, artistic and musical influences, his rejection of violence... We present together all those elements that make up a way of being and of understanding the world; in short, the intention of this assembly is to delimit the artist in order to give his keys and, subsequently, to be able to interpret any of his works. To get to this point, we have had to do without a chronological arrangement of the pieces at several times, since Pep Camps himself often goes back to rethink unfinished works or makes new ones with some theme that seemed already completed. So, this anachrony also serves us to start the exhibition from the paradigm shift that his stays in Asia represented for him, a vital turning point that marked him deeply. The other element to highlight is the Empordà, symbolized here by a collection of images of the omnipresent Montgrí, which the artist has been portraying every morning from the same location for a few years now. We could say that, just as the first room is more intimate and personal, the second is more direct, but it will also be the space that will finally take us into his universe. Two rooms that could be thought of as yin and yang.

Fita Foundation

In the same building, and after going up a flight of stairs also decorated, we will arrive at the Fita Foundation, which occupies the second space dedicated to Camps. In this case, the central motif is the series, the way the artist approaches his works when painting. Pep works on subjects that, once completed, are "parked" to start another, although we have already seen that this is not always the case. In any case, this allows us to show how it evolves in these different work cycles and see several complete sets. The most spectacular, presiding over the room, is Lights and Shadows , an anti-war manifesto with our Girona as the protagonist, inspired by the Dirty Words Pictures series, by Gilbert & George. The other two are the Boxers series, made in Berlin, about the communist role of Democratic Germany, and in the background on the right a set of collages prominent at the time by Eudald Camps. A selection where papers made in Bangkok also stand out, where we can appreciate the importance of his Asian journey and how transcendent it was for his work, finding here already many of the guidelines he will use later.

La Mercè Art School

The third area, the Escola d'Art la Mercè, is presented as a kind of prologue to the previous ones. Taking into account its location, we have been very careful when designing it, since we have put all the emphasis on content that is as didactic and enriching as possible for the students. Based on this premise, we present the artistic journey of Pep Camps before leaving for Asia. These are moments marked by the numerous trips made and by the much information acquired in those years. Various techniques, styles, museums, exhibitions, it is the period of training after university studies. By presenting it based on works made after escapades to different places, it allows us to teach a formative path based on his journeys and the places visited. We teach received influences, their passage through conceptual art, in short, how an artist's path is forged by accumulating experiences and knowledge.

House Mason

Casa Masó, on Calle Ballesteries, closes this cycle. The title, Interiors al quadrat , perfectly reflects what we will see: works from the Interiors series, by Pep Camps, within the interiors of what was the private home of the architect Rafael Masó. Here we wanted to play with the contrasts of the pure colors of the works, which now replace already existing paintings in the initial decoration, thus creating new atmospheres and dialoguing with the other existing works.

Pep Camps is a pure painter, the result of that equation of art equals life , an artist who looks up to Miles Davis or David Bowie when working. In the same way that these two geniuses considered music as a whole, breaking boundaries between styles and mixing others, Pep's works have no problem fusing figuration and abstraction or gesturality and kinetic, aesthetic approaches that at these heights have already lost all meaning in a unitary way. Painting as a global concept, where all variations have a place and are at the service of the work of art. Pictorial fusion.

In the image: Pep Camps. All has a price , 1997. Mixed media on canvas