Elvira Fustero: 'Between the divine and the profane'

Through thirty paintings and sculptures, Elvira Fustero invites you to explore a universe that fuses the spontaneous gesture and the stain with subtle and powerful geometric shapes. With the exhibition 'Between the divine and the profane', available at the Monjo Museum in Vilassar de Mar until the end of November, Fustero not only returns to his creative origins, but offers us a reflective and intimate retrospective of his journey in the world of abstraction and visual experimentation.

The exhibition, curated by Ramon Casalé, includes works created from the 80s to the most recent pieces, showing Fustero's constant evolution within informalism, a movement that explores gestural freedom and the emotional intensity of color and form .

The chronology that articulates the exhibition allows us to see how, from the 80s, his paintings begin to speak with warm tones: ochres, pinks and blues that fill the surface of the canvas with life and movement. But, over time, Fustero embraces a more neutral palette, where white, black and multiple shades of gray become the undisputed protagonists. This meticulous work with gray, where the artist applies several layers of color to capture all possible variations of a single tone, reveals his interest in the subtlety of chiaroscuro and the way light transforms space.

During the 90s, his work was concentrated in a series of black paintings where geometric shapes—especially rectangles and squares—took center stage. These elements, over time, were transformed into spirals and circles, suggesting dynamism and movement in his paintings.

Fustero's journey in the world of abstract expressionism takes us to the middle of the 20th century, when this movement took its first steps in the United States. There, artists such as Pollock and de Kooning began to experiment with gestural painting, a language that quickly spread to Europe under the name of informalism. In the case of Fustero, from the first moment, he found in the gesture and the stain his most powerful tools of expression.

His formal research, however, is not limited to painting. Fustero's iron sculptures, small in size but with a monumental presence, add a new dimension to his work. The concept of emptiness, so present in these sculptures, offers a reflection on the relationship between matter and nothingness, a metaphor for the spirituality that runs through all his work.

It is not the first time that Fustero exhibits at the Monjo Museum in Vilassar de Mar. Twenty-five years ago, it was also the scene of another important exhibition for the artist, an event that was attended by figures such as Arnau Puig and the poet Joan Margarit. Now, five decades after starting his path in art, he returns to this space with a new selection of works that show his personal evolution and his contribution to avant-garde art.