Joan Oltra and Teo Ortiz at the Valvi Foundation

Joan Oltra 'Fugacitat' (exhibitions of maturity) and Teo Ortiz 'The memory of trees' (exhibitions of personal memory) exhibit until October 31 at the Valvi Foundation in Girona.

According to Germina Bastardas, co-director of the Valvi Foundation: "Joan has the ability to say a lot with very little. His is a refined, sober aesthetic, which dispenses with color and entrusts everything to the interaction, between light and light shadow. One could admire these images exclusively for their visual power and their mysterious magnetism. But they are evocative works, full of resonances, that speak of their experiences, their troubles and their concerns it is very particularly marked by a mania inherent in the craft: the restlessness in the face of the transience of time. No other art has the technical ability to capture reality in a fraction of a second, to capture an instant, to borrow it from time and keep it alive indefinitely. Hence the desire to retain a moment that is destined to pile up, along with so many others, into oblivion." The photographs exhibited were taken with an analog camera, with 35 mm black and white film, and reproduce the images of still lifes, landscapes of Pallars Sobirà, Caldes de Malavella, streets, factories, houses, etc.

Joan Oltra (Mataró, 1949) enrolled in Fine Arts at Sant Jordi School in Barcelona in September 1966. From 1977 he bought a Nikkormat reflex, his first camera of his own, and since then he has never stopped taking analog photography. His first exhibition was in Barcelona in 2010 'Fugacitat' at Galeria Il mondo, in 2011 he participated in the collective exhibition 4 in Caldes (Casino de Caldes), in 2014 he exhibited 'The landscape, a look at the Fira of the Espinelve fir', with itineraries in Campllong and Brunyola. In 2015-16 he returned to the Il mondo Gallery with 'El fil de la memoria', which moved in 2017 to the Dòria bookstore in Mataró. In 2022 he exhibits 'El pou de glaç' at the Campllong social venue and in 2023 Els rastres del temps at the Casino de Caldes.

The second exhibition is that of Teo Ortiz 'The memory of trees' in which the protagonists are the trees, the immensity of the sea and the viewer, who according to Maguí Noguer, director of the Valvi Foundation: "he will find harmony, the serenity, the poetry and the silence that the contemplation of nature conveys to us through the secret memory of the pines, tamarisks, olive trees, banana paths, etc. that are very familiar to us."

Noguer also points out that "in Teo's drawings we can appreciate his unmistakable line, with the swirls in a continuous movement, which seems to arise from a tremendously free wrist, which forms spirals that remind a little of the notes of the great master Vincent van Gogh Obviously, they are separated by centuries, but they are certainly united by this love for simple nature."

The exhibited paintings are drawings made with pencil on paper, graphite on wood or mixed technique on wood. Teo Ortiz (Sòria, 1964) began to draw in a self-taught manner until in 1989, while living in Blanes, he began art studies, for five years, at the La Mercè Municipal School of Fine Arts in Girona. Currently, he lives in l'Escala and during all these years he has regularly exhibited drawing and sculpture in Girona and the surrounding areas. We must remember the exhibition he held in 2008 at the Valvi Foundation, under the title 'Individuals, papers and cartons'.

'Roques', Teo Ortiz (2022)