"Camins d'Aigua" by Berta Paco Sánchez (1985-2020) at CC Miramar in Sitges

The exhibition collects works by Berta Paco, creator and sensitive spirit, created between 2008 and 2014, the year in which the artist left painting. The fierce radicality of his stroke is contrasted with a colorful and lucid relational poetics. The wise use of collage, as well as the knowledge of classical and avant-garde art, place Berta Paco at the crossroads of post-modernity, flag bearer of a neo-informalism, as classified by Dra. Lourdes Cirlot in the conference he gave on Saturday 15 April as part of the activities surrounding the exhibition.

Lourdes Cirlot made a detailed analysis of the artistic corpus of the young artist who lived between Barcelona and Sitges. Among the characteristics he highlighted, Cirlot highlighted the concept of lightness contained in the artist's works, "the unbearable lightness of being", paraphrasing Milan Kundera's title. Ensems unearthed each and every one of the peculiarities that make Berta's work a paradigmatic example of the postmodern moment she lived through, imbued with that point of irony that is also one of the characteristics of feminist art.

In her attentive approach to Berta Paco's work, Professor Emeritus Cirlot delved into the author's texts that have been preserved and the works that have arrived, bequeathed by her parents who are the executors of the interesting and kaleidoscopic work by Berta. In this sense, they were able to learn about the influences that range from American abstract expressionist painters to informalists such as Tàpies or Miró. Lourdes' dissertation was quite a master class in which she nuanced many hidden or difficult aspects with the mastery and neatness that distinguish her.

The speaker's presentation will be given by Dra. Isabel Coll, expert in Catalan art from romanticism to modernism, especially in Sitget authors, the Illuminists and in the work of Rusiñol i Casas, in particular. She makes an affectionate and heartfelt introduction, highlighting the human and humanistic values that make them both creditors of the passion of those who have had them as professors at the University of Barcelona.

The delicate and at the same time profound diagnosis of Berta's work culminated in a heated debate where, without entering the field of the interpretation of symbols, the salvific power of art and the burden of conscience were put on the table politics that entails the exercise of artistic communication, social commitment and the disillusionment that causes the commodification of feelings and pure actions, the impotence to change an absurd and unjust world, the failure of ethics and, ultimately, the preservation of critical awareness and explicit denunciation as contemporary rights and duties.

The program of the exhibition, open until next May 14, combines the participation of artists, talks with the public, guided tours and conferences, which will close with a gloss of the artist's work, in four voices, with the reading of poems by David Jou, Vinyet Panyella, Lola Irún and Jorge Rodríguez.

On the ground floor of the Miramar Cultural Center in Sitges, the paintings and sculptures of Berta Paco have found communion with those who knew her and miss her, but her work has also reached all the people who entered without knowing her in his world following the penetrating waterways that seek to find a way out of vital impasses derived from reflection and introspection, embodied in his expressionist abstractions and his own urban art.

Isidre Roset i Juan is curator of the exhibition, Doctor in Art History from the UB.