POINT OF VIEW


Four Seasons - 2021

« With this exhibition, I want to approach plein-air painting; how the landscape goes beyond its representation and its imagination. I believe that the work is a faithful witness to all that surrounds and generates it. In The Angels series, I wanted each work to be full of air and light, ultimately charged with the landscape where each of the works was born.

Four Seasons is an example of paintings that seek to articulate themselves in such a way as if to become the walls themselves. Conceptually the series could expand infinitely »

Xavier Escribà

As important figure of the Catalan contemporary scene, Xavier Escribà has been developing, since thirty years, his oeuvre that questions the relation between the artistic gesture and materiality of the medium. That sometimes summons certain codes of the <i>Supports-Surfaces</i> movement, when the artist seeks to redefine the concept of “a painting”, as soon as it is freed from the physical structure i-->as it is traditionally known for. Based on that concept, his creations are often more as wall sculptures or even installation pieces.</i>

His work frequently, and in a very specific way, presents pieces which have as many layers of paint as the artist‘s age. This gesture metaphorically allows him to go back to his youth in order to celebrate the present. It is as much a way of being aware of everything he has experienced so far, as an injuction to a present carrying many possible futures.

His pictorial research reflects a commitment that strives to promote all kinds of paths in painting and to walk away from discrimination or a preconceived idea.

Olivier Waltman
Paris, March 2022

 


“The works of Xavier Escribà give painting a truth which elevates it from the state of medium to that of representation. This aspect is essential in the artist's vision: an exploration, an immersion at the limits of color, considered as a territory in itself. The layers of color awaken a memory of time. They invite us to write new stories that find their origins in telluric depths and aspire to the most metaphysical horizons. Like a demiurge who captures light and reconstructs it with colors, he chooses to renounce the frame and lets them become space, volume, presence...
Xavier Escribà delivers a post-modern vision of painting which detaches it from any narrative dimension and gives it a new freedom. Let's dive into a vibrant and visual poetics that speaks differently about color, outside of the usual references. »

Pilar Giro
Art historian and exhibition curator
Barcelona, ​​2019


ARTIST STATEMENT


Manifest

“Normally I paint as many layers as my age, a sort of tribute to the quest for the right image in painting.

I like that this process of creation of the pictorial material is slow, very slow so that throughout this revision of the biographical path, is accumulated and facilitates as and when the desire and the need to face the existence of the last accepted version of the pictorial work.

Nevertheless there are times when there is just the desire to paint, to live with painting, without end ... without wanting to be able to face its last official and definitive version. In these cases, I accumulate pictorial materials, dozens of "waiting" life courses.

 And that's what happened with “The Manifesto”, which became a collection of experiences that didn't want to exist in the form of a two-dimensional vision specific to painting, but of a three-dimensional presence. It is a major and fetish work which allowed me to give way to the other aspect that a strictly pictorial approach can take: a work which invites to have an approach closer to the sensory presence than to the traditional vision of a painting. »

Xavier Escribà
Barcelona, ​​2018