Guillem Rubió at the Valvi Foundation

From September 20 to November 4, 2023, Guillem Rubió (Barcelona, 1951) presents his work Before and After, Plots, Concepts and Realities, 1973-2023 at the Valvi Foundation in Girona. The inauguration was carried out by Pilar Parcerisas, art critic and historian, and Maguí Noguer, director of the Valvi Foundation.

The exhibition exhibits half a century of works by Guillem Rubió and has been organized by the Valvi Foundation in collaboration with gallerist Richard Vanderaa. It must be said that it is the first retrospective exhibition of the artist, since the main objective of the exhibition is to present the various stages of his long career. To make clear the diversity of languages and media typical of a capable and restless artist, but also that, despite the changes and evolutions throughout his career, in his work there is a presence that persists: the reality of the object .

The exhibition begins by presenting the real object, passes through its hyperrealistic representation and returns to the object through its imprint, entering the territory of abstraction. In the words of Pilar Parcerisas "Guilllem Rubió is an experimental painter. With innate qualities for photographic hyperrealism, he constantly takes on new challenges that distance himself from his virtuosity. He lives art in the present. Each period of his work erases the previous one, but always with a presence that persists more visible or more hidden: the reality of the object".

In this exhibition you can appreciate works painted in the initial period in Rubió (1975 and 1976), as well as the pieces made during the first half of the 80s, where the artist pours himself into painting the object in larger formats, such as a plate, a glass, a cup, fragments of these objects or combinations of them, from hyperrealism in large formats. You can also see works from 1985 and 1996 in black and white, such as the paintings in which he paints a metronome, a glass, a coffee pot, a glove, glasses, etc...

We can also see how Rubió is fascinated by a material that is gelatin that helps him give an organic patina to the finishes of his paintings. Also in this exhibition we can appreciate works made from 1996 to 2008 and works from 2009 to 2010. According to Parcerisas "it is at this moment that the white and raw fabric appears, with the trail of monumentalized objects, which intersect and which through the gelatin method turns the trace of the object into an abstraction. Usually these works are large-format paintings that turn transparency into opacity by accumulating objects."

It is worth noting the influence and admiration that Rubió feels for Morris Louis, the post-abstraction painter and the color fields, which leave the raw canvases. In the great paintings of the Catalan painter's last period we can appreciate how he paints everything with gelatin and then scratches and removes it before it dries completely to leave only the trace of the object. You can also see the works from the period after 2012, in which the artist creates a series of works on canvas and paper with plots and unfolded cardboard in which the conductive material is also gelatin, sometimes also combined with the 'acrylic (year 2013-15) in which he offers organic shapes such as geometric, in color or in black and white.

The 2015 works on medium format canvas show the black and white imprint of unfolded cardboard boxes. In 2023, the artist produces a series of important canvases. Guillem Rubió defines himself as a self-taught artist who updates himself at every moment of his artistic career. Apart from Morris Louis, he also admires and is influenced by Alfred Otto Wolfang Schulze, better known as Wols, the post-war painter and photographer who announced tachism with the expressive gesture of his painting. According to Pilar Parcerisas "as if it were his alter ego, some of the paintings were signed RWO and the date, in homage to Wols". Guillem Rubió has exhibited all over Catalonia and the Balearic Islands as well as Madrid, New York, Frankfurt, Cologne, Zaragoza, etc....