Leonardo Escoda: hearing quiet music

Rarely do you find an artist with such a deeply rooted feeling for his territory, with a work that largely aims to capture the essence of this territory. His journey was a continuous search for his surroundings, for his landscape, and for the commitment he had as a creator with its reality, a way of being that can be summarized in one of his phrases: being an artist is a way of understanding life, of going through the world, and it is even a way of finding answers. Son of Roberto Escoda, one of the emblematic painters of Terres de l'Ebre, he lived from a young age surrounded by paintings and his father's pictorial tools, an environment that guided his artistic vocation.

Creator of abstract work, which almost always has as a reference the landscape that saw him grow up, that he lived day after day, the Delta, its river, the rice fields, the dry land with its olive trees, which he translated into works of slow elaboration, with dense brushstrokes, to create his spaces, the landscapes. Spaces with cracks, with accidents, with seams, with marks, lived spaces that invite the viewer to contemplation. In his production the support was an essential element that Leonardo considered that he had to integrate as another element of his works. Supports that gave the effect of being found fabrics and papers, fabrics and papers with stories, stories that hide their secrets. And how not to make reference to the wind, another constant element in his work; as Arnau Puig pointed out, all his work revolves around the theme of the wind, omnipresent in his land. Memory of the Wind was the title of an exhibition of his at the Old Town Hall of Tarragona.

Música callada, Leonardo Escoda

Just as the wind deposits its dust and covers part of the territory, creating new shapes and hiding others, Leonardo worked in a similar way, covering his supports, giving them new textures, denser surfaces, as if they were the work of the passage of time. His last exhibition was Silent Music, in a singular space, the monastery of Poblet, a work that in some way synthesizes his work; in that environment his canvases conveyed what the artist had wanted when he titled his exhibition.