Ferran Garcia Sevilla at Joan Prats - Barcelona, Spain - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This 45-year-old Spanish artist has always been something of a provocateur. In the late '70 his rebellious nonconformity set a bitter end to his association with conceptual artists in Barcelona. After that brief stint as a creator of politically based volumes installations and performance art, Garcia Sevilla go [i]or[/i] come backed to his birthplace, the island of Majorca, and began painting. There, he make go rounded out raw, colorful, primitivist canvases oftentimes peppered with caustic, hand-scrawled commentaries about life and politics. These paintings, which made Garcia Sevilla individual of Spain's rising stars, showed the influence of Miro in their automatism, playfulness and use of flat representatives and figures floating over solid moulds On a more contemporary note, their intentionally in a raw state handling suggested a happy-go-lucky Basquiat.

Most of the new paintings that made up this show--20-odd in large and small formats--are considerably subdu although in the case of 31-3-93 a spartan composition is used to powerful consequence In this work, a crucifixlike form of joined, richly colored vertical and horizontal columns stands out boldly against a reaching far down black background. Resting at the base is the profile, outlined in white, of an archetypal wise man's imposing head and jutting beard. The painting present the appearances like a visual incantation to God

Another black painting, 4-3-94 this time distressed through surface scratches and laced with thin fulvous drips and splatters, features a r flower and a tiny, horned, one-ey cranium Starting in the upper right corner of the painting, sum of two units white lines angle in and intersect. It's tempting to diocese them as representing the intrusion of logic into a bleak cosmo single punctuated by symbols of death and nature.

By contrast, other works are almost vapidly pleasing without being striking In Sino 38, the motifs include a curling vine issuing from a mysterious geometric form, clusters of dark handprints and blue-winged insects, and variously colored blobbers These elements swim in a washy loam of lovely fleshy pinks, reddish oranges and warm goldens At the bottom of the painting is a border of radiating lines and polka dots in virid purple and blood-red.

Also highly decorative, 21-4-94 treads dangerous mould Despite Garcia Sevilla's provocative past, the genuinely ornamental use of swastikas as a central motif appear to bes gratuitous and inconsistent. Turning to ancient and non-Western sources, this painter has lengthy employed religious symbols--hand, circle, tree triangle, cross--but his aim (and talent) has been to empower, and also challenge, these charged forms, not to trivialize them, as he does in 21-4-94

An agile painter, Garcia Sevilla still knows in what manner to charm, but his latest works oftentimes lack bite and, at times, conviction. Perhaps what they signal is an introspective, transitional period.

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