The Cultural Factory of Terrassa reviews the life trajectory of Jordi Maragall

The Cultural Factory of Terrassa presents From a force that was created an approach to the life trajectory of Jordi Maragall (Barcelona, 1936-2023). The exhibition affects the freedom of approach that always characterized him. All the critics who have written about his work affirm that the artist assumes, in the same pictorial stage, the risk of the plurality of expressions, motivated by the type of representation and by the content he wants to express. This challenge with himself is motivated by the emotional spark that invaded him at the time of creation. In a back and forth, he accommodates both realism and abstraction, because he never wanted to be limited by concepts outside his autonomy. This exhibition comes to recognize more than sixty years of dedication to painting, always characterized by an existential expansion of great expressiveness.

Son of the politician Jordi Maragall i Noble and grandson of the poet Joan Maragall i Gorina, Jordi Maragall i Mira, he was born into a family of intellectuals, artists and politicians with decisive activities for the country. Undeterred, he followed his introspective path, his impenetrable world and his inner exile.

A painter of cultured training, since 1959 his orientation has gone through several stages in which expressionism has dominated with more or less intensity, although the constructive condition is always manifested. He studied painting in the workshop of Ramon Rogent, from whom he inherited the round shapes and constructive sense. Starting from this master, other artists such as Matisse and Rouault have had as references; he was also no stranger to the deformations of Munch or Kokoschka and was also inspired by Morandi's collection and Léger's play of shapes, lines and colors. His world evolved alternating moments of predominance of structural values with others of a more exalted vitality, manifested especially by the chromaticism, the passionate gestures and the black profiles that reinforce each of the elements.

The common denominator of his work is the energy - naked and stripped - that manifests itself with a distended force of the rapid movement of the brush on the support. Calligraphic strokes that dance and accumulate on the surface with a furious rapture, a product of his inner state. These are works in which he demonstrates great respect for the poetics of everyday life and simplicity.

The title, D una forza que sesbrava, is completely eloquent and explains his rebellious, solitary and transgressive temperament. It takes its name from the poem Oda infinita by Joan Maragall (1860-1911); the most important poet of the modernist movement. A deserved and warm tribute to Jordi Maragall; an artist dedicated body and soul to art. Pieces of life configured from the reflection of his self, episodes of an expressive force that exemplify the truth of art.